Fawad Chaudhry is an accomplished spin-doctor, enviably equipped to imagine and promote feel-good stories for whichever political party he decides to join for rising and rising in power games. These days, his talent is assiduously serving the Imran government.
As the hands-on Information Minister, he knew well that all our 24/7 channels would instantly cut ‘live’, whenever he took the floor during the ongoing ‘general debate’ on budgetary proposals in the National Assembly. Yet, he proved doubly smart by getting the mic at the outset of the sitting Tuesday to grab and sustain attention of a large number of people, either present in the house and galleries or watching its proceedings on television.
But instead of furnishing any glittering spin to budgetary proposals, Fawad Chaudhry primarily focused on deriding all the opposition parties. Heavily loaded with taunts and barbs his speech had a one-line message: leaders of all the opposition parties these days are not only incompetent but also “corrupt to the core,” unless proven otherwise.
Yet, the opposition felt too excited, jubilant and charged, when a heavyweight backbencher of the ruling party, Sadiq, took the floor. He is a retired army major from Attock. During the nine-year rule of General Musharraf, he had emerged as the most formidable and almost invincible patriarch of the local politics. Through marriage, he is also related to the Chaudhrys of Gujrat, who had been dominating the national political scene throughout the Musharraf years.
Close to the election of July 2018, Sadiq had joined Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf of Imran Khan. But since assuming the Prime Minister’s office, the cricketer-turned-politicians seemed deliberately keeping distance from him. In spite of feeling downgraded, Sadiq might have preferred to wait for good times like any pragmatic politician.
But to burn his heart, Imran Khan visibly patronised Malik Amin Aslam and then came Zulfi Bokhari.
Both of them hail from Attock, ‘the home territory’ of Sadiq. And politics, they say, is ‘local’ in the end.
Sadiq was thus anxiously waiting for the opportunity to explode and he did the same during Tuesday sitting.
He thrilled the opposition benches by being stunningly blunt. Sadiq would yet not question the “noble intentions” of the prime minister, though. “Unelected advisors (read Amin Aslam and Bokhari)” remained the exclusive target of his verbal assault. In fury, he also used an extremely disparaging term for these “unelected advisors.”
His thoughts were not ‘welcomed’ with spirited desk thumping from the opposition benches only. Fairly a significant number of the ruling party backbenchers also appeared warmly endorsing his position that the budget prepared by an erstwhile banker, who also is yet not elected to any of the two houses of parliament, had completely abandoned our ordinary farmers. The Imran government rather seems determined to pamper a select group of industrialists with lucrative incentives, while the left-behind of this country desperately wait for assuaging initiatives by the government.
A group of 10-plus PTI legislators almost came out into the open to associate themselves with Sadiq. Through enthusiastic desk thumping and loud body language, they certainly conveyed the feel of “defiance,” surfacing from within the PTI. Still, I seriously doubt that it would lead to a point, where the Imran government should feel panicky with the fear that its budget could be “rejected,” when it reached the final stages of approval by the National Assembly through voice-voting or headcounts.
Ahsan Iqbal, a PML-N stalwart, also delivered a comprehensive speech. As an Ivy League graduate, he started to dissect budgetary proposals with academic lenses. But soon switched to settle scores with points, Fawad Chaudhry had mainly drummed through his speech.
But he proved more lethal while mocking Pervez Khattak, the defense minister, who had shocked many of us, by repeatedly asserting during his budget-related speech Monday that Khyber Pakhtunkhawa Province eradicated “poverty” for good during the years, 2013 to 2018, when he ruled it as the Chief Minister.
Ahsan Iqbal is also a sharp spin-doctor. During his speech Tuesday, he cleverly interpreted a recent interview, Prime Minister had granted to an American journalist, for building a story that can create serious trouble for Imran Khan.
The content of this interview was widely reported in local media Tuesday morning. It was projected with shrieking headlines, which conveyed the message as if Pakistan was ready to abandon its nuclear program, if India would agree to resolve the core issue of Kashmir. Such inference sounded more credible, because in the same interview Imran Khan had also stated that personally he didn’t like nuclear weapons.
The opposition parties had certainly been furnished with ample ‘ammunition’ through the said interview. They are set it to viciously milk it for promoting the story that the Imran government was willing to “abandon Pakistan’s nuclear program.” Ahsan Iqbal rather played the first potent stroke to start a deadly game.
It’s time that Prime Minister should seriously reconsider his habit of being too spontaneous while granting extempore interviews to foreign journalists. In spite of being too experienced and accomplished politicians, presidents and prime ministers all over the world agree to grant such interviews, only after zealously done homework. Even if extempore, interviews with the heads of government are not allowed to go on air, unless thoroughly vetted by a team of senior aides and officers, duly trained in the art of communications and the skill of transmitting ‘messages’ on delicate issues of strategic and foreign affairs with cunning use of nuances.
Kashmir, no doubt, remains the core issue that increasingly turned Pakistan and India into the archrivals in South Asia. But so many decades before the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Muslims of the sub-continent seriously began developing the feeling that the establishment of democracy in the British India could eventually lead to ‘Hindu-majoritarianism.’
To preempt the same, a large group of leading Muslim politicians of the British India had established The Muslim League, way back in 1905. That eventually led to the creation of Pakistan. “Identity” proved the most motivating cause behind its emergence as a separate country from India.
Sadly, the successive governments of India since 1947 continued with aggressive posturing vis-à-vis Pakistan with the clear intent of establishing hegemony in our region. Then we came to 1971, when the Indian Army audaciously led the war to break Pakistan and help creation of Bangladesh.
After ensuring its objective in erstwhile East Pakistan, India then decided to go nuclear in 1974 to augment its ambitions for hegemony. That compelled Pakistan to develop its nuclear program as a “deterrent” to India’s ultimate and long-term strategic designs.
The unresolved issue of Kashmir had no direct relations to our nuclear program. And even the said issue is resolved, eventually through a win-win formula; Pakistan will never want to abandon its nuclear program, keeping in mind the accumulated fears of Hindutva-driven dreams of resurrecting “Maha-Bharat (the greater India) of the yore.”