Pakistan: Admitting when you are wrong-Chaudhry Nisar vs Pakistan

Daily Times

For the very first time, a ‘parallel’ session of the Senate is being held on the street outside Parliament House for the last two days by the opposition to protest against the highhandedness of Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali. The ‘regular’ session was held in the main Senate Hall, albeit without quorum. The protest is being held because the recent session of the upper house became unpleasant as Chaudhry Nisar, instead of taking in his stride the opposition’s complaint against the wrong figures he was quoting about civilian casualties in drone strikes, lost his cool and used unparliamentarily language to prove the critics wrong. Later, instead of revisiting his behaviour and mending fences by rechecking if there was any fault with the data he had presented from the Ministry of Defence (MoD), in the National Assembly (NA) he asked for the formation of a fact-finding committee to ascertain if he had behaved badly or not. Throwing all caution to the winds, the minister walked out when the Speaker was announcing the name of Mehmood Achakzai as a mediator to sort out the unnecessary fracas that has charged up the political atmosphere. The crisis has since deepened. Chaudhry Nisar is unwilling to acknowledge that he has been given incorrect information by the MoD and that revised data on the casualties in drone strikes would be presented soon in the Senate. Why would a matter as trivial as presenting wrong data, that too on something about which no one figure correlates with another from any other department, institution or government, be turned into a no-holds-barred confrontation defies explanation. It is not so much the wrong information given to the Senate as the manner of Chaudhry Nisar’s response to his parliamentary colleagues that has strained relations between the treasury and opposition benches. Even the MoD has accepted the mistake. Chaudhry Nisar’s assertion that he is not responsible for the working of the MoD is another inadvertent faux pas, reflecting the minister’s lack of understanding of how governments work. If the MoD is part of the government, it naturally falls within the ambit of the collective responsibility of the cabinet. Converting an official matter into a personal grudge and stubbornness will only heighten the apprehension among the people that the minister and his government are not handling Pakistan’s most pressing issues seriously; a point being peddled by the estranged Senators of the opposition. As the ‘debate’ among the lawmakers sitting on the road heated up, some went so far as to accuse the government of coming to power through bogus votes. An ANP Senator even accused the PML-N of replaying the disastrous politics of 1998-99. The protesting Senator has asked the PML-N to sack Chaudhry Nisar as its Interior Minister. The leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, Khursheed Shah, has requested Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif to intervene, because the opposition has refused to call off the protest unless Chaudhry Nisar withdraws the reply regarding drone casualties. The entire leadership of the PML-N, particularly the PM, is conspicuous by its absence to respond to the crisis in order to defuse it, strengthening the argument that the PML-N is running the government in a whimsical manner as opposed to the rules of a parliamentary democracy. The PM hardly ever graces parliament with his presence. Seemingly taking their cue from the leader of the house, the government’s ministers are remiss in their attendance. In this situation, both houses are at the tender mercies of Chaudhry Nisar as the point man for the government. That makes the minister doubly responsible, one for his personal conduct and another for representing the government. When he is uncouth and the rest of the cabinet is hardly in parliament, the question arises how they weigh constitutional and parliamentary democracy? Parliamentarians in both houses have been complaining of being left out on important issues as the required debate, with the concerned ministers present, rarely occurs. Mehmood Achakzai’s appeal to Chaudhry Nisar not to allow emotions to outrun sanity deserves to be heeded. The issue in hand is to bring the temperature down in both the houses by making Chaudhry Nisar realize that his ego is not above the country’s interests.