No time to waste

The coalition government is almost half way through its promised pace setter first 100 days but not much is there to showcase as its performance. The hope stirred by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in his inaugural speech is fast losing its ring. Long spells of power outages, skyrocketing inflation and poor law and order remain the people's lot.
All that comes up on the official radar is some high-sounding statements by the new leadership or details of the appointments made by them - more as reward for the time-tested old friends than the state's genuine requirement. Some contentious issues having ideological underpinnings, including the judges' restoration, tend to take the official focus away from the mundane affairs. At times the government machinery appears to be grinding to a halt. This is not a very encouraging scene but it is there, ironically, being made grim all the more by too much of fault finding in the outgoing administration.
A case in point may be Finance Minister Ishaq Dar's incessant condemnation of the failures of the previous government. He says past is past and he does not want to waste his time in dwelling on what had happened or did not happen. But what to do if the officials who served the previous government keep preparing for him reports "that I presented to the parliamentary committee". Being an old hand in this slot, Dar should know how such admissions of weaknesses scare away foreign investors. His prognosis was overkill: from the stock market alone the foreign capital worth over 1.5 billion rupees was withdrawn.
Quite a few of the issues that still hang over the head of the new government should have been taken care of by now. It was good that at a very early stage the government was given the mandate by the parliament to seek United Nations help in probing the assassination of Benazir Bhutto but astonishingly it still needs departmental inputs to be in the format that should be sent to the UN Secretariat.
The restoration of judges was another issue that literally emerged as the main rallying point for the then democratic opposition. The present coalition probably would not have been in the seat of power today without having won elections by raising this as their principal demand. But today this issue stands not only unresolved but threatens the very existence of the ruling coalition. When the then Chief Justice of Pakistan, Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, defied the most powerful man of the country, President and the Chief of Army Staff General Pervez Musharraf, he was not alone. The entire nation stood behind him with a mood and determination to give the final battle to the uniformed President.
This was to stop this happening ever again - whatever the exigencies providing justification for the 'doctrine of necessity'. The new government was ideally placed to give burial to this infamous concept but that did not happen. And, it may not happen, thanks to the myopic political considerations. Then there was, and remains so, the lingering instability in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. If the previous government could not resolve this imbroglio it was for the limitations it had accepted in a series of covert deals with some outside powers.
The new rulers are under no such obligation and should speed up its solution. How quickly such a development would restore stability in the country can be judged from the fact that a mere hint of talks with the angry militants almost eliminated the curse of suicide bombing and other related security hazards. That the issue is being given another twist is unfortunate and the sooner this move is scuttled the better for peace and security in the country. But, strangely, the matter is not receiving the high-level attention that it deserves.
The demons of the past will be ever in sight if we keep looking back for them. But these are different times in which we live today. The past, good, bad or ugly hardly matters now. The new government should jettison all that it feels was wrong - in a spirit of reconciliation as propounded by Asif Ali Zardari. If there are cases where the injustices that cannot be indemnified were committed the government should appoint commissions of inquiry and find and punish the offenders.
Likewise, if Dar really feels that his predecessor had committed wrongs which cannot be condoned he should appoint an inquiry commission and summon the officials who now report to him on their past masters to come forward and speak up on public record. Otherwise, he should bypass the past and move quickly to grapple with the myriad challenges that confront the national economy. Time is the essence and the present rulers would fritter it away in tackling non-issues at their own peril.