The Punjab caretaker CM The parliamentary committee comprising the outgoing PML-N government and the opposition consisting of the PPP and PML-Q finally, after lengthy deliberations, agreed on Najam Sethi as the caretaker Chief Minister (CM) of Punjab. Reports say the PML-N’s hand was forced to accept Sethi despite him being a PPP nominee because they chose their own nominees unwisely without proper homework and then were confronted with the possibility that the matter would end up with the election commission, which may in any case find Sethi the least objectionable candidate, in the process robbing the PML-N of the mantle of mature consensual politics. About the PPP, it is being speculated that President Asif Ali Zardari played his cards cleverly, choosing nominees that ostensibly were distant from the PPP. Whether this assertion stands up to scrutiny, however, is another matter. Outgoing PML-N Law Minister Rana Sanaullah, one of the members of the parliamentary committee, while announcing the decision, tried to put a brave face on it by saying the decision was in the greater interest of the nation and province, and that they had confidence in Sethi and hoped he would be as impartial as caretaker CM as he was in his political analysis. Both parties, the PPP and the PML-N, seem to be suffering from memory loss. Najam Sethi started life as a revolutionary Marxist and joined the Baloch resistance against Zuklfikar Ali Bhutto’s military campaign in that troubled province in the 1970s. Arrested, tortured and imprisoned in 1975, he was finally released from Hyderabad Jail where he and many others were incarcerated in the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case a few months before the case was finally withdrawn by the General Ziaul Haq regime. He returned to his native Lahore, set up a publishing house and later an English weekly that continues to date. In 1999, he was arrested and mistreated by Nawaz Sharif’s second government on charges of treason related to a speech he gave in New Delhi, which the then Pakistani High Commissioner Ashraf Qazi (lately of the bin Laden raid commission fame) presented to the government as anti-Pakistan. After his release in 2000, Sethi had to undergo heart surgery because of the physical and health damage incurred during this incarceration. In 2002, he became the founder-editor of this newspaper and remained at its helm until 2009, when he fell out with its publisher the late Governor Salmaan Taseer on, amongst other things, working for another media house while being editor of Daily Times. Currently, he was hosting a talk show on a private TV channel until his appointment as caretaker CM, for which he has taken oath yesterday. Sethi’s statements after taking oath and comments in the media converge on the most important task before him: ensuring far, free, transparent elections are held in Punjab, arguably the real battlefield of the coming polls. Consistency has not been one of Sethi’s strong points, his pendulum swings between the PPP and PML-N, depending which party was in power, being the only constant. That, however, has not stopped his march to the caretaker CM’s office now. However, if there is any consistency in Sethi’s long journey from a committed Marxist in his youth to becoming a successful part of the political culture that has overtaken the polity over many years, it is his ability to land caretaker jobs. In 1996-7, after then President Farooq Leghari booted out his own PPP’s government under Benazir Bhutto, Sethi was appointed federal caretaker minister for accountability. In that role, some assert, he prepared the grounds for the later cases Nawaz Sharif’s second government instituted through Saifur Rehman’s Ehtesab Bureau against Benazir and Asif Zardari. None of this has stood in the way of Sethi’s climb to one pinnacle after the other. Now the expectation is that he will rise to the challenge and prove all his critics wrong by fulfilling the heavy responsibility on his shoulders to ensure a credible election in the province under most contention in these polls.