In Balochistan, not only are things not what they seem, they are not even what they are being called.
Since
the Supreme Court ruled on October 12 that the provincial government
had lost its “constitutional right to rule,” a cabal of grouchy
scavengers has descended on Chief Minister Raisani, baying for his
blood.
First, we found out that Balochistan Assembly
Speaker Bhootani had bluntly turned down a request by the chief minister
to call a session of the assembly. ‘I won’t budge until the legal
position of the provincial government is determined’, Bhootani argued,
claiming that he didn’t want to be hauled in for possible contempt of
court.
Next, PPP’s Balochistan President Mir Sadiq Umrani
pushed to have Raisani’s membership of the party cancelled, reportedly
for “not following party discipline.”
But that was last
week. This week, the constitutional status of the provincial government
is ostensibly just as blurry as it was last week but we hear that
Bhootani may convene an assembly session after all.
Is the crisis over?
Sadiq
Umrani argues that Raisani has to go because he has brought a bad name
to the PPP by misgoverning and spending billions of rupees on his family
and on a luxury plane for his personal use instead of on the province’s
suffering masses. Now, with few exceptions, when Pakistani politicians
talk about suffering masses and funds in the same sentence, things are
often about the funds but seldom about the masses.
Interestingly,
until May this year, Umrani was Raisani’s minister for communications
and works – y’know that unimportant little ministry that handles the
planning, execution, development and maintenance of all roads, bridges,
buildings and other development works in the province? That gets more
than 30 percent of the entire provincial budget?
It looks
like Umrani and the chief minister developed some ‘differences’ over the
use of this small amount of money, which runs into billions of rupees,
as well as over the transfers and postings of some focal officials of
the ministry. Come May this year, Raisani sent Umrani packing,
bifurcated his ministry – the roads and building departments – and
allotted it to two PPP ministers, Ali Madad Jattak and Agha Irfan Karim
respectively. Previously, Jattak and Karim were both strong Umrani
supporters but have jumped ship after being gifted the lucrative
offices.
Since his sacking, Umrani has repeatedly landed
up at the presidency asking for his portfolio back but the president has
been of little help. Frustrated, he has joined hands with the PPP’s
Kalat wing to wage a media war against the chief minister, accusing him
of giving billions of rupees to his senator brother, and running the car
theft and kidnapping mafias in Balochistan.
For Umrani,
then, the Supreme Court judgment is the goose that laid the golden egg,
in his personal struggle to avenge the powerful Raisani one way or the
other.
But what about the Balochistan speaker? What’s his problem with Raisani?
Though Bhootani himself denies it, those with a keen eye on the province’s politics have an interesting tale to tell.
In
the 2008 election, Raisani was elected MPA on a PPP ticket. On the
other hand, despite having been virtually routed in three provinces, the
Pakistan Muslim League-Q emerged as the largest single party in the
Balochistan assembly, bagging 17 of 51 seats. But despite this booming
win, the Q-League faced several hurdles in mustering the required
support to form a coalition government. Guess who came to its rescue?
Muslim
Leaguer Bhootani, himself elected from Lasbela, first threatened to
form a forward bloc if the PML-Q tried to impose its own candidate for
the top slot in the province, and then joined hands with the PPP to get
the PML-Q members to support the PPP in the formation of the new
government.
Bhootani’s own motivations for helping out the
PPP, and ultimately Raisani himself? Blocking Bhootani’s bête noir, his
Lasbela rival, Jam Yousaf, from bagging the CM slot yet again.
Those
close to Bhootani say he often boosts that Raisani would never have
been chief minister if it weren’t for him. And for this small help, he
expected the chief minister to continue to support him against Jam
Yousaf.
Except not too long ago, Raisani announced a
federal ministership (portfolio undecided) for Jam Yousaf and has held a
series of meetings with Bhootani’s rival during his frequent visits to
Islamabad.
For a scorned Bhootani, too, the Supreme Court
judgment is a gold mine, a chance to exact his revenge from the pulpit
of constitutionalism. If you ask him why he refused to oblige the chief
minister’s request for an assembly session, he says he just wants to be
sure he’s not doing something in contempt of court. “And imagine the
chaos when people question the very validity of a caretaker government
put in place by a chief minister whose own status is unclear,” Bhootani
argues.
No doubt, Bhootani and Umrani will have a hard
time trusting Raisani with something like the composition of the interim
set-up when he’s already let them down once.
But will they succeed in their crusade against the chief minister?
Raisani
is the ultimate Teflon politician, the power politician’s dream come
true. No matter how terrible the state of affairs outside the sanctums
of the Balochistan assembly, inside he has rock solid support. His
allies may criticise him by night but in the cold hard glare of the day,
no one dare speak against him. How does he do it?
Part of
it is the old-fashioned way: patronage. Thanks to the NFC, Balochistan
is awash in vast amounts of cash that Raisani has carefully distributed
throughout the assembly. The funds are not in the millions, not even the
tens of millions, but the hundreds of millions of rupees per MPA. Only
if you have a blood feud with Raisani or are a bitter foe of an
important ally are you excluded from the largesse. And that kind of
money can buy very real political support. And that’s not counting the
liberal accommodation of demands: you want a police officer reposted, a
bureaucrat ousted or a secretary transferred out? Raisani will oblige
you, no, or few, questions asked. That’s his style of governance: ask
the finance secretary who was transferred out for resisting Raisani’s
instructions to release additional election funds on the insistence of
senior JUI minister Maulana Wasay.
The other part of
Raisani’s survival strategy is the composition of the Balochistan
assembly: highly fractured. Of the 65 MPAs, the PPP has just 14. So even
if Zardari is really unhappy about Raisani continuing – and he is at
least somewhat unhappy, we hear, especially with Raisani having botched
up the Reko Diq case – to get Raisani out, the president would need to
win over some of the 19 mercenaries in the PML-Q or 10 religious
parties’ members.
In Balochistan, winning over means
buying up. Too expensive, too complex, too time consuming – that’s the
equation for anyone who wants Raisani ousted. And so, Balochistan
continues with the devil it knows.
The president too is
stuck between Scylla and Charybdis when it comes to Raisani: on the one
side are the angry protestations of some members of the Balochistan
assembly and on the other the Supreme Court’s blunt interrogations about
the chief minister’s constitutional authority to rule. Will Zardari
ever do the right thing when the right thing is wrapped up in a court
judgment?
Looks like we’re stuck with Raisani, for now.
The writer is an Islamabad-based journalist. The views expressed here are her own. Email: mehreenzahramalik@gmail.com