Daily Times Editorial Jan 5, 2010

Zardari’s revelation

President Asif Ali Zardari had set tongues wagging and the rumour mills grinding overtime when in a speech the other day, he said he would use his “political weapons” against his detractors and critics, whom he has accused numerous times in recent days of seeking his ouster through unconstitutional means. Some took this to imply a veiled threat. Now, the president has revealed his hand. The “political weapons” turn out to be the electoral college that voted him overwhelmingly into the presidency last September. Even as he mentioned that the weapons were none other than the assemblies in an interview with BBC Urdu Service, the Balochistan Assembly was passing a unanimous resolution of support for him. The resolution expressed full confidence in his leadership, appreciated his key role in evolving a new consensus formula on the 7th National Finance Commission Award, and called him the symbol of the unity of the federation. With the ringing endorsement of the Balochistan Assembly under his belt, the president can look forward, according to reports, to a similar resolution of support from the NWFP Assembly. It is even being reported that the Sindh Assembly, which had earlier passed a resolution to this effect, could be persuaded in the emerging circumstances to repeat that performance to send a clear message to all and sundry. Not only all this, the sessions of the National Assembly and Senate summoned by the president may see similar moves too.
Inevitably, when all the houses seem to be getting ready to speak with one voice on the issue, the focus will now shift to the Punjab Assembly, where the PPP is part of the coalition government led by the PML-N. Whether the Punjab Assembly will join in, and whether the president can command a unanimous resolution in that house remains to be seen. However, were Punjab to seem out of step with the rest of the assemblies, that will raise concerns about the impact of such an ‘absence’ on the unity and solidarity of the federation, Punjab having been in the dock in the past as the ‘big brother’ who always hogs the lion’s share of the cake and is responsible for the past domination of national life by its ruling elite at the expense, it is alleged, of the rest of the provinces. The good effects of the recently arrived at consensus formula for the National Finance Commission Award could be washed away if a negative perception about the most populous and developed province were once more to set in because of any such development.
The strategy of calling on the assemblies on an issue of political import has been used once before by the president. The occasion was the desired ouster of former president General Pervez Musharraf, who was left with little choice but to resign when all the assemblies passed unanimous resolutions asking him to go and it became clear that his own institution, the army, had also abandoned him. The strategy’s use the second time round is aimed at giving a resounding blow to the campaign being run by certain quarters to discredit the president and the PPP-led government to the point where their departure becomes almost an inevitability. If the elected representatives en masse endorse the president and thereby the government led by his party, it would blow a big hole in the adverse campaign mentioned above.
The president seems to have been finally stung out of his silence and bunker mentality. He has not only come out on tours to ensure he is seen in public, he has been using every such occasion to come out swinging against his opponents and sundry unnamed ‘conspirators’. While no exception can be taken to the president politically defending himself through perfectly legitimate moves, it would be best if he avoided the combative and sometimes derisory language being used against him by his opponents and thereby safeguarded the dignity of the high office he holds.