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| Pak Prime Minister is in a quandary | | Half a dozen pretenders want to take his job | | B L KAK
NEW DELHI: Pakistan. And political chaos. They, in recent days, have appeared to be the two sides of the same coin. The Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, has been in the line of fire for the past quite some time. And for right or wrong, his ministers, in whose selection he had no hand, have heaped misery on him. If latest media reports from Islamabad were to be believed, at least half a dozen pretenders permanently masquerade around waiting for a wink to take his job.
Shaukat Aziz has barely manged an uneasy truce with the sugar barons in his cabinet and the party, who had been waging an overt and covert turf war. Rather than sacking some of them for manipulating the market to earn windfall gains estimated to be over Rs100 billion, he had to contrive for them a justification in shifting the blame to external factors. Ruling party members have indulged in signature campaigns to embarrass and insult him.
Now the Opposition has also targeted him. Last week in grueling sessions of the Senate and the National Assembly, that debated the Supreme Court verdict annulling the privatisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills, he was asked to resign. On its heels has come the no-confidence motion with a 500-page ‘chargesheet’ that, on face value, looks formidable and lethal even while granting the cryptic observation by a prominent TV anchor that on occasions it descends from sublime to ridiculous. While the opposition apparently does not have the numbers and the motion is bound to fall through, the Prime Minister cannot expect to emerge unscathed.
Ironically, the dilemma facing Shaukat Aziz is unique. He probably suffers more by default and much less for any serious fault of his own. He is trapped in a system in which all the strings are pulled from somewhere else while he is just a pawn and conduit in the entire scheme of things. But then he has chosen to be part of this system of his own volition. While one would have expected him to be true to himself — a corporate figure steeped in austerity, he let himself be swayed by the glittering trappings and aura of the office to which he was elevated two years ago. He seems to be fully enjoying that offensive opulence against which he once so passionately argued with former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, to get rid of.
In November 2002, when Pakistan President, Gen. Parvez Musharraf, relinquished one of his many offices and swore Zafarullah Jamali as Prime Minister, he declared that he is transferring ‘responsibility’ (not the powers) to the new chief executive. That was a very tricky dispensation and a dangerous dichotomy. The one who has powers and exercises even those he is not entitled to, he is responsible to none, while the other who has no authority has to be answerable to all the acts of omission and commission of the government. This is the farce in which Shaukat Aziz had stepped in and that is the tragic predicament he is confronting today.
Shaukat Aziz has been accused of corruption, by inference if not by direct evidence. He is being held responsible for a variety of scams — sugar, stock market crash, cement, oil prices, high profile privatisations of PSM, PTCL, Habib Bank, appointments on key posts in violation of rules, land scams etc. The litany of allegations against Aziz is more a reflection on the current style of governance than an attack on his personal integrity, which his supporters vouchsafe and the detractors have not directly questioned. He has followed the bidding from above.
After the announcement of Supreme Court verdict, Aziz is reported to have gone with relevant file to the president and asserted that he did nothing without his approval. Does that absolve him of inability to refuse to endorse illegal and irregular orders?
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