THE FRONTIER POST
The matter couldn’t be dismissed as innocuous or small as it involved a serious breach of rules of transacting the official business. Mian Nawaz Sharif
may be the autocratic supremo of his faction of the Muslim League. His faction, the PML (N), may be in rule in the province of Punjab. But he had had no right whatsoever to take an official meeting on the Murree development projects, as he did the other day. That prerogative exclusively rests with his younger sibling, Shahbaz Sharif, who is heading the provincial administration. It is he who is the chief minister of Punjab. And it is he who alone can call officials’ meetings and transact official businesses. Nawaz has no locus standi at all to directly intervene in official matters. The province, after all, is his no personal real estate; nor his family’s. It has to be run and ruled in accordance with the stipulations of the constitution and in line with the laid down rules of conducting the official business. Can he or any of his acolytes tell what constitutional provision entitles him to interfere in official matters when he occupies no official position in the official hierarchy of Punjab? Or can they even pinpoint the rule that permitted him to call the official meeting to review the progress on the Murree projects? If he was not satisfied with the work on the projects, he could have conveyed his dismay to his younger brother who could have acted remedially. His direct intervention is an unacceptable indefensible gross misconduct out-and-out. Indeed, with this implausible behaviour he has not just undermined the official position of Shahbaz, who actually holds the official position of the province’s chief minister, by virtue of which the provincial officialdom is accountable to him alone, not to Nawaz. Yet more revealingly, he has demonstrated how spurious and specious are his much-touted professions of commitment to constitutionalism and the rule of law, with which he is regaling the nation’s ears ad nauseam for so long. Not that very many have been taking his pious vows any seriously. It is only his own loyalists and sidekicks, together with a section of palmed-off media, who are building him up as a reinvented man. On the street, his professions are falling on deaf ears. His past is too blemished for his vows of piety to carry conviction any easily.He, after all, is no Sonia Gandhi. She is palpably a very powerful figure in the party and a very decisive influence on the government policies. But she maintains all the niceties, proprieties and decorums meticulously. In the party, she goes through the laid down consultative mills for evolving the party lines on issues. Never ever she presides over cabinet meetings or calls the officials for a dressing down. She heads the coordination committee of the leaders of the coalition partners of the government that her party leads. The committee hammers out broad guidelines for the government, and then leaves it to Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, to work those into policies, plans and programmes. No leader interferes with his functioning. And even as Singh may be under Sonia’s thumb, she too refrains from meddling with the government’s working. But then Nawaz is a different breed. He is no real but fake. He poses to be a democrat, but is an autocrat temperamentally and practically. He runs his faction as his personal fiefdom and only an incorrigible idolater would testify that the party election he held recently were not a ruse and if were not mere nominations under the cloak of elections. And the political grandees from across the spectrum he had assembled in his wilderness in London under the banner of All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM) are still smarting from the wounds he inflicted on them by ditching them shabbily at the eleventh hour.The conclave had unanimously decided not to participate in the election under the dictator, Pervez Musharraf. He threw his hat in the electoral ring unabashedly, leaving them licking their wounds. And the pundits say the real test of his loud avowals of independence of judiciary will come if and when verdicts come out from the judicial floors on the cases pending there against him and his family members. In any case, all that is between him and the people. But spare he must the official businesses from his atrocious unlawful interventions.
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