If last month was a roller coaster ride for Pakistani politics, this month has been even more so. Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf held a political rally in Islamabad on September 8, a couple of weeks after it was postponed on August 22. Some speeches at the rally could be read as incitement to violence. The speech of the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Ali Amin Gandapur, for instance, was not just crude and abusive but also full of misogyny targeted at the chief minister of Punjab, Maryam Nawaz, and female journalists.
The State’s response to the rally, while not surprising, was uncalled for. Days before the PTI rally, the government passed the peaceful assembly and public order bill, 2024, which is not just punitive in nature but gives sweeping powers to the authorities and goes against the people’s right to assemble. This law was used to arrest PTI lawmakers from inside and outside parliament a day after the rally. However, encouragingly, the Speaker of the National Assembly, Ayaz Sadiq, is standing by the parliamentarians despite political differences. The chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, has also talked about the sanctity of Parliament and criticised the government for the arrests of PTI leaders. But, at the same time, he also criticised the PTI for disrespecting Parliament. Bhutto Zardari’s remarks about Parliament’s sanctity are important. The political class has to treat opponents with respect in spite of differing ideologies so that they can work together. Politics should not be about personal enmities or settling scores. However, this respect has to come from all sides.
There has been talk of a ‘constitutional package’ for some time now, but nobody knew what it entailed or how the government planned to get it passed as it does not have the required numbers for a constitutional amendment. After months of denial and then limited concession, last weekend, the government had to face embarrassment when sessions of the National Assembly and Senate that were called to table the 26th constitutional amendment bill went to waste because the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl chief, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, was not convinced about the draft. The draft which finally came to light following all this haggling is being seen as an attack on the independence of the judiciary. The points of the draft aside, one reason why it should be seen as contrary to democratic norms and antithetical to Parliament’s sanctity is the way it was kept a secret and not debated at all in Parliament. Many observers pointed out that the proposed draft should have been discussed with all stakeholders, including the judiciary, the bar councils, civil society and, above all, parliamentarians. This is where the government failed. But the debate that it did not want is finally taking place in the public domain. Whether this bill passes or not remains to be seen. Some more changes to the bill are being discussed. As is usual with our politics, there is never a dull moment.
Amidst all this political gymnastics, we have not paid attention to some other issues that are critical to the future of Pakistan. One, of course, is climate change — something that affects each and every Pakistani. In 2022, we witnessed one of the most devastating climate change-induced floods in the country’s history. With an estimated loss of about $30 billion, more than 33 million people were affected due to the floods. Over and above the losses in billions of dollars is the fact that millions of homes were destroyed, one-third of the country’s land was submerged under water, thousands of kilometre of roads were damaged, and thousands of schools and hundreds of health units were also destroyed. The United Nations said that the 2022 floods pushed about nine million Pakistanis into poverty. In order to address the climate change emergency, Pakistan has launched the transformative Recharge Pakistan project, aimed at building climate resilience among communities vulnerable to worsening floods, heat waves and droughts. This is an important initiative and one that the government must focus on as its top priority because politics can wait but dealing with climate change cannot.
Mehmal Sarfraz is a journalist based in Lahore; mehmal.s@gmail.com
