Daily Times

These are hardly the best times for the ruling party. While the opposition is always up in arms regardless of the time or place, as would be expected of it, now lawmakers from the ruling alliance, from all three provinces ruled by PTI, are also speaking their hearts out; that too in the national assembly. Issues of violence and lawlessness in parts of Punjab, promised tax exemptions and missing persons in erstwhile fata, and MQM’s concerns about cryptocurrency have started resonating loudly in the lower house.

While in advanced countries differences of opinion within parties, even those in power, are considered healthy for representative governance, it is sadly not so in countries like Pakistan. Here, as is the norm, everybody in any party is only supposed to toe the line ordered by the leadership; no matter one’s personal opinion or irritants like data-based facts. And, if the past is any guide, should one break trend and offer one’s own two-pence worth, then the lawmaker in question should be ready to face quick backlash from the party bosses.

Yet issues raised by lawmakers in the house, especially those relating to lawlessness, should be taken very seriously by the government. Sardar Riaz Mehmood Mazari, for example, a PTI lawmaker from Sadiqabad, lamented that he was beginning to lose support of people in his constituency because he was unable to honour his campaign promise of restoring law and order in the area; and that too only because the official machinery was not paying any attention to his concerns. The fact that he personally met with the entire political and security leadership of the country, with the exception of the army chief, and still nothing was done about rising violence in his area speaks volumes of the government’s neglect of something as important as controlling crime and saving lives. Since such things also affect the party’s vote bank in the long run, it is shocking that nobody in ruling party’s hierarchy is interested in such things. The same is true for the missing persons issue, even though it has been raised time and again on the most serious platforms in the country.

It’s rather simple to understand that once lawmakers lose the support of the people, parties lose the loyalty of those lawmakers, and ultimately everybody suffers when it’s time for the election. How seriously PTI takes this friendly fire now that it’s reached the lower house of parliament remains to be seen. *