Participating in ‘general debate’ on budgetary proposals during an overstretched sitting of the National Assembly on Monday, a large number of senior parliamentarians, from both sides of the aisle, mostly delivered engaging speeches.
But hardly a person seemed to have assiduously combed the plethora of budget-connected documents; Shaukat Fayyaz Tarin, the finance minister, had put before the House, ten days ago. They kept drumming salient points of their parties’ so-called “narratives.” We have been enduring this glut since the launch of 24/7 channels in the early 2000s.
Mian Javed Latif, a PML-N member from Sheikhupura, sounded justifiably bitter. Some months ago, he had uttered remarks, which a “patriotic” citizen believed, attempted to incite “sedition” against the State of Pakistan and its permanent institutions. The police arrested him on his complaint and before being recently released on bail, Javed Latif had to spend many weeks in interrogating dungeons of Punjab.
Pervez Khattak, the minister of defense, is one of the most senior parliamentarians sitting in the current house. He had also been a very powerful Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhawa from 2013 to 2018.
One seriously expected him to firmly scuttle widely spread rumours, claiming that the US was seriously pursuing Pakistan to let it establish a military base on our soil to watch over the scene in Afghanistan, after the scheduled withdrawal of foreign troops from that country in the second half of this year.
Being a shrewd politician, Khattak enviably knows his “limits,” when it comes to “sensitive issues,” allegedly falling in the “domain of Defense Minister.” Instead of embarrassing himself for sounding clueless and hardly briefed on the subject, he cleverly decided to walk down the memory lane. With contemptuous arrogance, he continued to recall ‘unprecedented initiatives,’ he presumably took for establishing ‘good governance,’ in the province he had ruled for five long years.
Perhaps feeling giddy with self-praise, he even made the audacious claim that not a single resident of Khyber Pakhtunkhawa now lived in poverty. Mud-houses had turned ‘history’ for that province and its residents were enjoying perfect health and prosperity. The ‘success story’ of the PTI-led governance in KP, motivated Khattak to assert that at the end of Imran Khan’s five-year term as the Prime Minister of Pakistan, by the middle of 2023, the rest of Pakistan would also be feeling good and comfortable about life in general. One miserably failed to decide whether the consummate politician in Khattak was being cynical or genuinely believed the story he continued telling us with visible pride and fancy.
Personally, I felt extremely disappointed with the speech of Omar Ayub Khan. This grandson of our first military dictator, General Ayub, does not sound like a novice when asked to seriously discuss economic and fiscal management. He had been elected to the National Assembly, for the first time, way back in 2002. Shaukat Aziz, then a very powerful finance minister, instantly took the youthful Omar Ayub under his wings. Throughout his five-year rule, he remained the junior minister of Finance and mostly impressed observers due to his dedicated hard work for learning highly complex sides of economic management by any government, elected or otherwise.
Since August 2018, Prime Minister Imran Khan has frequently been appointing Omar Ayub in charge of various coveted ministries like energy etc. Seemingly, he failed to deliver. Yet recently he got shifted to the ministry of planning.
Introducing the budgetary proposals ten days ago, the Finance Minister had tried hard to spin a feel good story. He kept claiming that the Prime Minister’s vision and brave heart amazingly unleashed the collective resilience of Pakistanis. In spite of the dooms day scenarios that a large group of globally recognised economists were imagining about Pakistan’s economy, we were able to reach the growth rate of around 4 per cent by the end of last fiscal year. And the miracle happened despite the yet unabated wave of a pandemic. Shaukat Tarin also insisted that Pakistan had also begun traveling on the path to fast growth. He did not feel the need of introducing any “new taxes,” therefore. He also refused to accept some IMF conditions, which he perceived as anti-growth.
Not only the opposition parties but also a huge group of credible economists are not willing to buy the feel-good story, Tarin had tried to promote through his budget speech. As if to prove them right, Khurram Dastagir Khan of the PML-N certainly delivered a forceful speech in the house previous Saturday.
Ruthlessly dissecting the budget-related data, finance minister had formally put before the house, Khurram Dastagir rather succeeded in amplifying the message that Tarin was attempting to build castles in the air. The budget he had prepared was massively laden with alarming ‘holes.’ The constraints of a huge deficit could force Pakistan in the end to desperately seek financial support from ultimate regulators of the ‘market-based’ global economy. And nothing comes for free from the global institutions and foreign countries. They might press Pakistan to join their game in Afghanistan, in return to the favors sought from them.
With his knowledge and experience, Omar Ayub Khan was almost tailor made to counter the story developed by Khurram Dastagir Khan with a cool, comprehensive and data-driven speech. With such speech, only he could augment the feel-good story Tarin had tried to promote.
But Omer Ayub Khan remains obsessively stuck in the past. He could yet not forget and forgive that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the founder of Pakistan Peoples’ Party, was initially ‘groomed’ in the art of politics by his grandfather in the early 1960s. After getting the floor, Omer Ayub Khan always starts with “those days.” Then he tries to remind that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s “grandiose ambitions” eventually forced him to “betray and defy” his mentor and Pakistan fell in the ditch, primarily due to his politics and policies.
Omer Ayub keeps referring to the past to promote the feeling that the party, PPP, established by ZAB, continues to play havoc with the country due to reckless cravings for power and money by its leaders.
Even after agreeing to his prescription, you would still want to know where the economic management by the Imran government was heading. And Omer Ayub seldom strains his mind to articulate answers to this question.
He also made me laugh by proudly claiming that Imran Khan-led PTI was now the “sole representative” of Karachi, the most populous city of Pakistan. Since Omer Ayub Khan seems so obsessed with the past, he should also remember what had happened in the same Karachi, way back in early 1965.
During the presidential election that year, his grandfather was declared to have defeated Mohtrama Fatima Jinnah, the sister of this country’s founder we still fondly remember as “Madre Millat (Mother of the Nation). Most Pakistanis strongly believed that the said election was massively rigged or at least managed by the powers that be.
Yet, father of Omer Ayub Khan decided to “celebrate” the “victory” of his father by roaming the streets with a crowd, perceived as “undesirable elements” by the average residents of Karachi. What happened after that is history and I don’t want to repeat the same. But before claiming the “ownership” of Karachi, Omer Ayub Khan should always remember it. After all, his mind seems obsessively hooked to ‘history’.