WOLVES LURK ON ROADS, CHATTER RESOUNDS in PARLIAMENT

By Saeed Minhas

An Increasing sense of paranoia continues to creep into the society where unknown faces ranging from Taliban to secret agencies and now even Rangers personnel are becoming trigger happy knowing very well that their acts would eventually be given a blanket cover by an

internal or even a judicial inquiry and if nothing else works than by their spin doctors.

Keeping aside the ground reality that Nawaz league is desperate to launch itself on national horizon as an aggressive and pro-people party and how much they will gain from this new found spin to cover their past follies, Khawaja Saad Rafiq just set the tone for the rest of the parliamentarians including few from treasury benches to come really hard on the conduct of armed forces and secret agencies. As his voice was reverberating in the hall, parliamentarians made a bee line to add fuel to the fire against armed forces by mentioning the very recent events as well which brought commotion to the entire nation and thus kept asking for cutting down their huge budgetary allocations.

Javed Hashmi while reminding everyone of Dhaka debacle, repeatedly asked the federal government in genera and politicians in particular to rise above their political folds and join hands to curb this rising trend of extremism amongst state institutions like Army and Rangers.

Senators on the other hand remained equally upbeat in condemning the cold blooded murder of a teenage by Rangers and took Rehman Malik for a ride for trying to cover this brutal act of state terrorism. Malik is supposedly responsible for manning the Rangers throughout the country but knowing an open secret that how much he can do, will it be of any use to ask him for a real inquiry, asked one of the disgruntled member of PPP after the session.

Going on the respond to his own query, he said that certainly there is no point in doing that because the supposed man of crisis of the present government is already sitting on more than two dozen inquiries including the one about his own leader’s assassination. Therefore, he said that let him be a free roaming minister and continue to see himself on TV screens for almost everything ranging from politics to policing, from foreign ministry to spokesperson of the armed forces and thus materalise his ultimate dream of becoming not the de fecto but a de jure foreign minister of the country.

But as an ANP stalwart later mentioned while sitting in cafeteria that neither any resignation is coming forth nor any remorse will be felt by those who committed this and many other such brutal acts against the innocent civilians in the past. Another seasoned senator roaming around power corridors since 1970s seconded it by reminding us all that only a strong political dispensation can become an answer to their pshychological and over-arching domination, which is hard to imagine at this point of time.

Revisiting the fateful days of 1970s when the army had to lay arms in front of the enemy, he said that though morale of the army was very low at that time as well-- just like it was when Musharraf lost charms for the west or just after OBL or Mehran Base issues--and they felt some remorse as well and were not coming out of the barracks in uniforms but still they did not let a strong civilian government of Bhutto to conduct an inquiry for quite some time and when it eventually was formed then they did not let it see the light of the day.

He even did not minced his words to mention the dirty role of judiciary in this regard by saying that had they not been sitting in the lapse of uniformed people, Pakistan would have been heading an altogether different path by now. But, mentioning towards his silvery-white hair, he said that after all army is a national institution and it has become addicted to certain perks and privileges, therefore, either the ruling elite have to give them a permanent role through constitutional amendments or if they want to keep them confined to the barrack even then they have to shun their petty differences and define some kind of TORs for them to sort this issue once for all.

Otherwise, he opined firmly that things will continue to go from bad to worse and rule of law will remain elusive for the commoners in this country.

What remained an issue of interest throughout this debate was the concern of the parliamentarians about the importance of parliament. It has become an unfortunate norm that whosoever sits on the top chair assumes that it has become his/her responsibility to not only defend the state institutions under the fear that incase of denial to do so would mean an end to the rule.

Same was the case with the government of Mr. Gilani, as it has shown with consistency a pattern that no matter what either they will remain silent to let the masters speak and then follow them or sometime they fail to understand the silence of the local masters and starts following the foreign ones without ever applying their own political minds to set the tone. If wikileaks are something to go

by then revelations made therein are enough to put not only politicians but even our military janta to shame.

Will they ever realize that foreign masters are uniting on one point that no matter how they have been using or mis0using this land of the pure, now it has become an internal problem of Pakistan and therefore, they seem to be fed up with the leadership (both civilian and military) and have taken up the road of direct intereference by riding on their dollars and Euros and if they fail to read the writing on the wall, then Tunisia, Egypt or Syria might have been saved by Saudis (for the sake of their own kingdom) but there will hardly be anyone standing for us and we might have to face a Libyan fate. But the question remains that will the political leadership be able to come out of its shadows-of-fear and take the lead in sorting out the mess created by all the state institutions?