Khawaja Mohammad Asif is one of the most senior leaders of a huge faction of Pakistan Muslim League. This group continues to firmly associate itself with Nawaz Sharif.
During his third term as the prime minister, the so-called Panama Papers had surfaced like a bang in April 2016. They named a large number of powerful politicians from different countries for allegedly indulging in reckless money laundering and buying high end properties and running lucrative businesses through a shady network of offshore companies. Nawaz Sharif was personally not named there. But his family was clearly named.
That triggered a huge campaign for accountability. Imran Khan primarily led the said campaign. After many months of ceaseless noise, the Supreme Court was finally persuaded to probe into the matter with suo motu powers. At the end of a lengthy trial, often reflecting the dramatic highs and lows of popular soap operas, Sharif was declared disqualified to participate in active politics. Later, the Accountability Court also sent him to jail under serious charges of corruption. But his health began to deteriorate fast in jail and he had to be sent abroad to seek treatment for life threatening complications. Since then, he is staying put in London.
A significant number of Nawaz Sharif’s loyalists, including Khawaja Asif, vehemently defend their leader. They strongly believe that a scandal was “invented” against Sharif. Some powerful elements of our patriarchal State, compulsively addicted to set political scenes, exploited the same to get rid of Nawaz Sharif. He seemingly ‘asked for it’ by consistently asserting supremacy of the elected government and forums. Sharif’s loyalists also claim to be carrying on with his ‘mission’.
Delivering a long speech during the National Assembly sitting on Monday, Khawaja Asif sounded to be doing the same. The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had also arrested him for allegedly living beyond his visible and declared means. But he had to be released on bail after spending around six months under interrogation and judicial custody late last month.
Khawaja Asif is also a veteran parliamentarian. After being elected to the Senate for the first time in early 1990s, he soon reached the National Assembly and had never lost any election since then. During the initial years of his parliamentary career, he had developed the reputation of a fiery speaker. His party often used him as the lethal weapon to demolish its opponents during parliamentary debates. With age, however, he had certainly turned mellow and the speech he delivered Monday was a text bookish example of, “Father, I want to confess.”
The start of general discussion on “the presidential address,” Arif Alvi had read before a joint sitting of parliament around eleven months ago, provided him the opportunity to speak at length. But the operative part of his speech kept keenly wondering whether Pakistan ever had a parliament, considered “supreme” vis-à-vis the rest of State institutions.
Answering the same question, he candidly admitted that the political class of Pakistan had gradually been “surrendering” more and more space to unelected forums. Instead of holding “the other” exclusively responsible, though, he primarily blamed politicians’ insatiable greed of power, which continued, “empowering others”. Even he and his party had been doing the same throughout the decade of 1990s that ended in almost a decade of General Musharraf’s rule, he confessed with visible regret.
Asif’s candid confessions were indeed praiseworthy. But he cunningly avoided explaining whether apparently struggling to attain “Vote Kau Izzat (respect for the vote) since 2018, his party ever vacillated and why. I could only wish that he had the courage to furnish an honest answer to this question as well, while seemingly swayed by the confessional mood. After admitting politicians’ collective mistakes on many counts he also failed providing answer to the question: “Where to go from here.” He apparently had only one solution to recommend for resolving the accumulated problems of Pakistan: holding of free and fair elections. That’s about it.
Yet, in the same speech, Asif also recalled that Dr Henry Kissinger had once told one of our veteran diplomats, Jamshed Marker, “Elections in Pakistan always add new problems to your country, instead of addressing the previous and accumulated ones.”
During the last PML-N government, Khawaja Asif also held the portfolios of defense and foreign affairs. He is fond of reading history books and often quotes from them, profusely, during informal conversations with close friends. But he sounded frighteningly clueless about the emerging scenarios in Afghanistan.
During his Monday speech, he often referred to a recent meeting as well where the Chiefs of Pak Army and the ISI had briefed senior leaders of our political parties regarding the ongoing developments in Afghanistan. The conversation there went on for eight long hours. Yet, Asif could not bring out any assuaging message from there. He rather kept repeatedly forewarning that things looked “alarming” in Afghanistan and they could lead to serious consequences for Pakistan.
I am an old admirer of Khawaja Asif. But he sort of disappointed me Monday. One felt this, not because his tone and tenor sounded guarded and tamed. I was not expecting him to lynch the government with his in-your-face style either. What really disenchanted me was the fog, dominating a mind once acknowledged being too sharp and crystal clear.
Like Khawaja Asif, Senator Raza Rabbani is also a leading veteran of promoting the cause of “civilian supremacy.” A fresh session of the Senate also started Monday and this day is reserved for private initiatives for legislation by the upper house of our parliament.
Taking advantage of it, Rabbani tried to introduce a well-crafted law, clearly desiring that the “federal government,” through the elected parliament, should acquire complete authority for running the CPEC Authority, an institution acting like the one and the ultimate window to develop mega projects with Chinese investment.
Ali Mohammad Khan, the state minister, wanted to block it. But the government was short of the decisive majority in the house and the law introduced by Raza Rabbani had to be passed on to the concerned committee for deep vetting and active consideration.
And this happened during the same Senate sitting at the outset of which Sadiq Sanjrani, the Chairman, announced that from now on the senators should stop using the expression, “I beg to…” Their ‘dignity,’ he added, deserved that Honorable Senators should be introducing their bills and suggestions by saying: “I wish to…”Watching Rabbani’s efforts for introducing a law, which the government can easily scuttle due to its majority, I kept wondering why “the Senators’ dignity” was feeling so shy of taking total command and control of the CPEC Authority.