PESHAWAR: It has been 38 days since Chief Minister Pervez Khattak took oath of his office and those thirty-eight days have been amusingly roller-coaster.
No wonder, the nascent government has yet to find its feet, not so much probably for want of desire to settle down and get going but for reasons and factors that are beyond them.
Beginning from the top, Mr Khattak, the lean, tall bespectacled veteran of past governments, seems a stand-alone man. Perception, and there is a good measure of it, is that he is irrelevant, or has been made irrelevant.
Decisions, it is said, are made in Zaman Park, Lahore, and not in Peshawar. This, officials say, is adding up to the backlog and stymieing the whole reform process.
‘Directives’ to the top bureaucrat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said to have come directly from the PTI chairman, to “bring your own team” in the presence of the ever-brooding chief minister has given further fillip to the perception of a toothless Khattak.
And if that was not enough to damage the credentials of the party in power in KP, instructions to the bureaucracy, from some people really close to the party leadership, bypassing the frail-in-frame chief minister, has made some wonder; who is in-charge here?
This, and the horde of consultants and working groups laden with some of the party candidates, who lost elections in Lahore and elsewhere with ready-made recipes to make their dream of a Naya Pakistan come true in KP, has not helped things either.
What happened was probably more amusing than the most popular television comedy show these days. The ‘visionary’ consultants had no clue that Gen Musharraf’s 2001 Local Government Ordinance was history and that KP has its own local government law enacted in 2012.
And then PTI’s much cherished village councils. It turned out that the statistics these wizards of change had brought with them had been taken from an internet source. The figures did not add up. Little wonder, the dream has had to be put on hold till further discussions in Islamabad and Lahore.
Not very surprisingly, some of PTI’s own party ministers are brimming with frustration. They feel suffocated. In the words of one minister: “The party leadership should have faith in us and let us work. There is no need for the people from Lahore to come and teach us how to run this government.”
This, more than anything else, may harm the image of PTI’s KP government of being remote-controlled from Lahore. Already, what were whispers are now murmurs. Some within the officialdom liken the PTI leadership to a drone hovering above the one-square kilometre area above the Chief Minister’s Secretariat and the Civil Secretariat.
And need this be told also that the spleen-venting new generation of politicians is clueless about KP’s Problem No 1, security? Never mind their statements ad nauseam on the War on Terror. Their first presentation on what they wanted to do had a blank slide with a big question mark in the middle on security, this according to an official who attended it.
So, the pressure is telling. Like lemmings, PTI’s ardent followers in the cabinet, passionately parrot the party’s policy statements, even if it sounds bizarre and at times ridiculous, given the context of the situation.
And need this be told that the spleen-venting new generation of politicians “It is not our war”, say some ministers. “This is an imposed war”, say others. Chief Minister Khattak has gone a step further, almost with a bended knee, offering to extend due reverence to the Taliban with whom, he insists, his government has no quarrel. Just, when the month of May saw the highest number of terrorist incidents 119 in total, the highest in the last five months.
The alarming thing is that all divisions, except, Hazara have shown substantial increase in the number of terrorist attacks. Peshawar is leading the figures in the number of attacks.
As the casualty figures mount with bombings, attacks and target-killings, the ministers justify the acts. “This is a reaction to drone attacks”, they say, even if this ‘revenge’ is grossly disproportionate -- 2,500 to 3,500 militants and ‘civilians’ put together -- to a total of 48,000 Pakistanis killed since September, 2001.
What is more worrying is the confusion caused in the rank and file of the KP police by such statements.
If it is not “our war” as the police say, “Why should we be fighting and losing lives on a daily basis”, they ask -- the police casualty figures are staggering, 65 of them having lost their lives since January 1, 2013, the highest casualty figure to-date in six months. “Why not abolish all the checkposts around Peshawar and other places and raise white flags,” they ask.
For this to happen, they say, the KP government does not have to wait for national consensus or national policy. All that needs to be done is an executive order from the chief minister in this regard.
Given the lack of clarity and prevailing confusion, the mounting police casualties has rattled their rank and file, something that the ministers would have known, had they been attending the funerals at the Police Lines, now happening on a daily basis.