Hasba
Again!
By Col. Riaz Jafri (Retd)
Westridge, Rawalpindi
The 9 o’clock news on the 31st October
showed proceedings of the NWFP Provincial Assembly
after presentation of the Hasba Bill by the government
benches. How I wish I had not been a witness to
the spectacle.
It was painful to watch the honourable members
of the government and the opposition gesticulating
at each other and the ladies violently throwing
papers around. It was a sight of complete commotion
and turmoil in the assembly and a picture of the
house divided against itself.
The killer quake – though extremely unfortunate
– had brought the entire nation together.
People from all walks of life – soldiers
and civilians, politicians and workers of all
political parties, doctors and nurses, students
and teachers, industrialists and labourers, NGOs
and social organisations, media men and showbiz
celebrities - name any one and they all had got
united and were out there in the calamity hit
areas to provide succour and solace to the afflicted.
The entire nation stood as one. It made each of
us proud of being Pakistani. And here comes the
Hasba to divide us once again. I ask the movers
of the bill, “Did they not know of it being
controversial? Did they not know of the reaction
it would invoke from the opposition? Could they
not wait for a little while more? Why were they
bent upon creating the disunity and disharmony
in the nation which had for once forgotten all
about her petty differences and gotten united
to serve the suffering humanity? And the suffering
humanity is from their very province. The same
poor and pious people who had voted them into
power. Why were they relegating their most important
and crucial cause and hurting them in the process
by giving Hasba priority over them in the assembly?
They should have been instead discussing the rehabilitation
and reconstruction of the quake hit areas.
Or, is it because that they find it hard to see
the nation so fully united and that they want
to sow the seeds of discord again?
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