The members of parliament can be seen rubbing their eyes and yawning hugely during the assembly sessions in parliament. For them, yawning is a privilege that's hard to win and easy to drift into. Plush seats, central heating cool environment and droning voices make both upper and lower houses a great place for a short snooze.
The impression which an ordinary person gets from their sweet slumber, are the sessions so boring and nothing practical come out of them? If it is so, they might be allotted a special room in Parliament for having a comfortable nap behind the closed doors evading the eyes of common man?
How they act, how they behave reflect the professional depth of our lawmakers as most of them do not have proper knowledge of the prevailing issues being discussed in the parliament. The parliamentary democracy is essentially dependent on the people who make/amend the laws for running the country in the right direction and perhaps this is the reason we lag far behind from rest of the world as we think lawmaking a business of few holding the real power.
It has been obvious for some times now that the parliament is just not up to the mark and the MPs need a lot of brainstorming as democracy has not been given a chance to nurture fully. This is the main reason that many a time, the same people, who are sitting in the parliament, have paved way for consecutive martial laws, which snatched the power of fighting for the right of the common man.
The consecutive dictatorships minimised the chances of improving the management and development machinery of the country through proper lawmaking and afterwards monitoring and evaluation of these laws to satisfy the masses and prepare them to face any eventuality in hard times.
All throughout, the parliament seems to have been guided by greed and the desire to have a tight grip on the office come what may. It has not made any effort to find solutions for some of the pressing problems being faced by the country whether in domestic or foreign policy arena.
No visible improvement was made, except passing resolutions during the last four years and that too joint resolutions, but none of them were implemented. If the implementation of these resolutions on the face of it, passed by all the political parties were ignored, the convening of any such moot in future will certainly turn out to be just another exercise in futility.
The parliament, which is of course a top legislative body, a stabilising force to balance the executive and judiciary, has not been able to play its due role. The Parliament, most of the time, is either sound asleep or in the midst of some sort of controversy. It is true that the Supreme Court has lost patience with the government's many ways of defying its directives time and again. The apex court has been pressing for implementation of its directives for the last two years but the government turned a deaf ear saying, "We can't."
So, by the logic that it is always easier to fail than to succeed, the government has drawn the maps and coloured them, possibly by guessing, or worse. If I can be pardoned for being cynical, the major opposition political party Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) too is not exactly frothing at the mouth.
According to some insiders, it is the PML-N, which should be blamed for all the looming confrontation between executive and the judiciary over contempt of court notices issued to the prime minister. It is the PML-N which extended all-out support to the government in the name of saving the so-called democratic system, while a man who has a little sense can very well imagine that a party which brainchild of a dictator has nothing to do with the democracy. Now it is of no crying over spilt milk and this is for sure that when you are part of the wicking party, you learn how to pretend to die or cry.
They are aware of their unpopularity. They are trying to cheat their way back into office by various clumsy tactics, including taking the country back to the era of elections without voters' registration, making people fool by distributing laptops, ghee tins, and flour bags.
The ruling junta is concentrating all its energies on grabbing as much wealth as they can, knowing that they may not get such a golden chance again. That is unacceptable...current parliamentarians, or most of them, have overstayed their welcome. Time for them to leave now!