ISLAMABAD: The civil and military bureaucracy should be scrutinised by the parliamentary public accounts committee, however, the judiciary can opt for whatever it wants and parliamentarians will respect its position, provided it takes a declared position.

If this was the crux of the message conveyed by opposition leader Chaudhry Nisar on Wednesday night in the National Assembly, then whether he was calling the grapes sour or not, he certainly was sounding like a person looking for a bargain. Now, as the political pundits pointed out, if he was trying to send a message to the khakis by telling them how corrupt their bureaucracy had become because of Musharraf, then he certainly knows what he is playing with. After all, he does claim to know them inside out.

If he was telling the judiciary that they are sacred and parliament is scared, even then he knew what cases are pending before My Lords and how careful he is about the sanctity of the higher judiciary – the same sanctity that was once ‘treated’ by his current political boss Nawaz Sharif the same way Mustafa Khar ‘treated’ a sitting army chief Gul Hassan in the 1970s.

One wonders which side Nisar is playing these days because on the one hand he is trying to convey to the media through his National Assembly rhetoric that there exists a fissure between the two Sharifs, and on the other side he is trying to play with an established (uniformed one) and an emerging (black robes) power player for obvious gains, commented a PML-N leader representing southern Punjab’s sentiments.

There are others in the party who think that since Shahbaz Sharif is finding it hard to reconcile with his disgrace at the hands of ‘the chief’ and Nawaz Sharif is not happy with the way he (Nisar) is pampering his younger brother, therefore, the opposition leader is just lost in the times and is planning his way back to the party’s elite club and to some estranged mentors, both at the same time.

First his stance was why the federal government did not take Nawaz Sharif on board while deciding the power conservation plan by saying that “while Shahbaz Sharif is the chief minister of Punjab, he is not the head of the party”. Then he showers praises on the government for allowing him a free hand to demonise many civil and military bureaucrats as the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee by ignoring that just a day ago Nawaz Sharif was talking about joining the protesters if the government failed to sort out the power crisis at the earliest. But will he be able to bridge the gaps with Ishaq Dar and Ahsan Iqbal if not with Makhdoom Javed Hashmi remains a big question making rounds amongst the party MPs.

Some of the observers noticed this trichotomy taking place within the PML-N and hoped that both Sharifs come out of their shells by first forgetting how many somersaults they had taken in the past couple of weeks and then by ignoring the fact they had failed to give the governance that they had been boasting of since landing in the country, and then caring about ending this confusion amongst their ranks, otherwise the birth of yet another league cannot be ruled out.

Source: Daily Times, 6 May 2010

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