The Bhutto government says it is ready to hold powerful people accountable. It has therefore proposed an amendment to the constitution in order to achieve this end. A parliamentary committee of 25 MNAs, which has yet to be set up, is supposed to vet this bill. Among the fierce party stalwarts proposed for this ‘independent’ committee are Mr Yusuf Talpur (the slippery agriculture minister), Mr Ghazanfar Gul (the perennially frothing MNA from Gujrat), Mr Khurshid Shah (the laid-back education minister) and J Salik (the minority maverick). Does this sound credible?
A close reading of the bill reveals that Ms Bhutto is up to tricks as usual. The bill proposes to give all powers of indictment to a special parliamentary committee of 12 members in which the government and the opposition are supposed to have an equal number of nominees. But this ‘neutrality’ breaks down if the chairman of the senate also belongs to the ruling party, like the speaker of the national assembly. When the senate chairman belongs to the opposition and the vote is tied, a simple majority vote in the national assembly is all that is required to uphold the ruling party’s point of view. In other words, Ms Bhutto will be able indict or absolve anyone at will if the amendment is carried!
Experts say that the bill is aimed squarely at the president and superior judiciary. At the moment, the president can be only be impeached by no less than 2/3rds of the membership of both houses of parliament. Under the proposed bill, he would be at the mercy of a simple majority in the national assembly. What a foxy way to blackmail the president to stay in line! Similarly, at the moment a judge of the high court or supreme court can only be removed by a supreme judicial council of peers. But the bill proposes to force judges to kneel before the national assembly like the president. What a dastardly scheme to shackle the superior judiciary to the executive in charge of a rubber stamp legislature!
It is unfortunate that Ms Bhutto has chosen to spurn the cause of accountability in such a devious manner. It is, however, fortunate that she doesn’t have a 2/3rd majority in the national assembly to carry out her crafty plan. But no matter. Time is running out and, sooner or later, accountability is bound to catch up on her and others of her ilk. Consider.
The Lahore High Court is expected to restore Mian Manzoor Wattoo as chief minister of the Punjab soon, even if it is only for a week or two. When that happens, horsetrading by Ms Bhutto and Mr Wattoo will take off in earnest. That is when a disgusted public will expect President Farooq Leghari to sit up and take notice of a new violation of the constitution. The president has already written several letters to the prime minister pointing out other violations of the constitution in the last three years.
It is also worth recalling a recent decision of the Lahore High Court in support of the freedom to demonstrate and protest peacefully. The government’s panic-stricken response to the Jamaat i Islami’s attempt to stage a “dharna” in Islamabad has violated many fundamental rights. Scores of people, including Qazi Hussain Ahmad and PML-MNA Ijaz ul Haq, were arrested or injured. The public was stopped from entering Islamabad. Mobile phone services were switched-off for most of the time; road, rail and air services were officially disrupted. And so on. Can we now expect the Lahore High Court to put the government on the mat for refusing to implement its writ?
Ms Bhutto also says she intends to revamp her cabinet to make government more efficient and accountable. As proof, she has brought in Mr Naved Qamar as finance minister in place of her finance advisor, Mr V A Jaffery, who has been packed off on long leave. Is she joking or what? Mr Qamar is, to be sure, a thoroughly personable man. But his PML predecessor at the Privatisation Commission, who is in prison awaiting trial for corruption, is not a patch on him. TFT has run a number of stories seriously questioning Mr Qamar’s modus operandi while he was chairman PC. So the mind fairly boggles at the thought that he will now run the finance ministry at the behest of, you guessed it, the one and only Mr Asif Zardari.
Ms Bhutto has now got so desperate that she has opened up secret channels of communication with Mr Nawaz Sharif in a last-ditch effort to dupe him into saving her government on the pretext of “saving the system”. But Mr Sharif will rue the day he falls into her trap. The lady simply cannot be trusted to keep her word.
Ms Bhutto is running out of tricks and time is running out on her. And we, the public, should not settle for anything less than full and transparent accountability which starts from the top and keeps on going relentlessly until all the crooks have repaid their titanic debt to this nation in a fitting manner.