THE speaker of the National Assembly has ordered a probe into the unfortunate incident outside the parliament building in which a crowd of PTI supporters harassed and manhandled senior leaders of the PML-N. The probe is not likely to produce an outcome. Since the incident most senior PTI leaders have either ignored the incident or blamed the opposition for holding the press conference at a venue where a PTI crowd had gathered. This amounts to blaming the victim. It is an illustration of the depths of partisan politicking we have fallen into that seemingly reasonable men and women of the government are ready and willing to justify the manhandling of their senior parliamentary colleagues — albeit from the other side of the aisle — to avoid blaming their own supporters. Such apathy and deliberate callousness is fast pushing our politics towards moral bankruptcy, and thereby chipping away at the legitimacy that politicians must retain in order to keep the representative system afloat.
This legitimacy also got a battering by the electoral manipulation that happened in the NA-75 Daska by-election under the direct supervision of the PTI’s Punjab government. It got further degraded by the shenanigans Pakistanis witnessed before and during the Senate elections. Leaked videos of vote buying, allegations of horse-trading and the government’s failed attempts to force through a change in the mode of voting for narrow political interests are events that together have delivered a body blow to the legitimacy of the system in its present shape and form.
Nothing could be more unfortunate. After decades of struggling for constitutional democracy and a representative system of governance in which all parties are critical stakeholders, today’s political outfits are reversing themselves — and the system — into an unpleasant past. Loathing is all pervasive. This hate is beyond the stage where rivals can construct a functional relationship for the sake of the system. The incident outside parliament has shown that those in government are unwilling, or unable, to dilute their virulent partisanship at any cost. The genesis of this virulence lies, to a great extent, in the unwillingness of Prime Minister Imran Khan to accept the PML-N and PPP leaders as genuine parliamentary rivals. He considers them corrupt thieves who should be in jail, not in the assemblies. His rank and file have internalised this narrative and therefore it is not surprising that partisanship has acquired the colours of personal enmity and collective loathing. It was this loathing that drove PTI supporters to attack senior leaders, including a woman, of the PML-N, and it is this loathing that disallows PTI leaders to condemn the incident without any conditions attached. Pakistani politics is hurtling down a worrisome path and few appear to recognise the threat, or care too much about it. Someone needs to usher in sanity and restraint before we hearken back to the demons of the past.
LNG concerns
TWO public-sector LNG companies have raised safety concerns over the excessive utilisation of the country’s two existing LNG terminals. A joint report by Pakistan LNG Ltd and Pakistan LNG Terminal Ltd says that both terminals are overstressed and the LNG value chain is very fragile when compared to global standards owing to inflexible infrastructure constraints. It also points out that both terminals could face operational and safety risks. Contrary to perceptions, the combined utilisation of the two terminals has been around 84pc against a global average of 43pc, which leaves very little flexibility to handle shocks. Even countries such as Kuwait and Argentina, which rely on floating storage and re-gasification units like Pakistan, have a far lower utilisation rate. The reasons for overstressing the existing LNG import capacity are obvious. First, its inability to attract investment in new terminals means the government has no option but to fully use the existing facilities to meet the country’s increasing LNG import needs. Second, the failure to build LNG storage requires the authorities to overstretch the existing capacity, especially during winters when the demand for imported gas peaks, which shows up in lower-than-world-ratio ‘re-gas to storage’ and ‘import capacity to storage’.
There are several factors, including policy flaws, pipeline capacity constraints as well as malicious propaganda against the sponsors of the existing terminals, which have blocked or discouraged private investments in new terminals. Although the government has ‘provisionally’ allowed two more companies to set up terminals, the unavailability of sufficient pipeline capacity to bring imported gas to Punjab — where the most demand exists — is keeping them from breaking ground. For unknown reasons, the government is also not allowing the existing terminals to increase capacity for bringing more gas for private-sector customers. Meanwhile, the regulator is yet to approve ‘third-party access rules’ and the ‘inter-user agreement’ that would allow terminal operators to sell imported LNG to buyers including the textile, power and fertiliser industries. With Pakistan’s gas demand increasing on account of economic growth and higher capacity utilisation, it is crucial for the country to build new terminals as well as invest in LNG storage and pipeline infrastructure. In recent months, we have seen gas companies rationing gas quantities at the expense of industrial output only because we do not have sufficient LNG import infrastructure to bring in the quantities required. Time is of the essence in this case.
Swiss ‘burqa ban’
WHILE concerns about violent extremism may be genuine, in many situations these valid apprehensions can be used as a cloak for Islamophobia. This appears to be the case in Switzerland, where voters have narrowly backed a ban on face coverings, widely seen as a vehicle to prohibit burqas and full-face veils that some Muslim women wear.
Just over 51pc of Swiss voters backed the ban, with a campaign spearheaded by a rightist party in the alpine nation. While the proposal did not mention the face coverings by name, ominous posters with a fully veiled woman, plastered with slogans to ‘stop extremism’ sent a clear, disturbing message. The intentions of this campaign further come into question when the number of women who wear the burqa/niqab in Switzerland are considered: according to one figure 30 women wear the niqab in a population of 8.6m.
This means there is no imminent ‘threat’ of veiled women overrunning the streets of Geneva and Zurich anytime soon. Unfortunately, Switzerland has taken such regressive steps before, such as the ban on minarets in 2009, also backed by a referendum. Amnesty International has called the burqa ban “a dangerous policy that violates women’s rights”.
Sadly, several other nations in Europe — France, Denmark, Austria etc — have taken similar steps. Rather than genuinely helping curb extremism, these moves only help propel the agenda of far-right parties in Europe, who see Muslims, people of colour and racial minorities as ‘outsiders’ trying to change the continent’s ‘pure’ culture.
We have seen the horrors this pursuit of ‘purity’ unleashed in the mid-20th century, when fascist forces seized power in several European states. Instead of promoting integration and coexistence, such moves will further fuel the divide between ethnic and religious majorities and minorities in Europe. Moreover, women should have the right to choose what they wear, and such decisions must not be imposed by the state. Has this central tenet of democratic thought been forgotten by those backing such bans?
