FROM A RINGSIDE SEAT

The 21st session of the Senate began 90 minutes behind schedule here on Tuesday evening, but finally when it did begin, it was a tumultuous beginning. As soon as the House was through with nomination of a panel of presiding officers for the rest of the session, and condolences for the ex-senator Malik Faridullah and some others, the impending privatisation of the PTCL emerged as the major issue.
Rising on a point of order Leader of Opposition Raza Rabbani warned against PTCL privatisation. He was of the view that not only such an act would cause unemployment, it would also put national security at risk. "And then why to sell a profit-earning enterprise while holding back another unit of the same outfit, which is incurring losses?" Having said that, he led the combined opposition out of the House on a token walkout.
Information Technology Minister Awais Leghari stoutly defended the official position on the PTCL. He said the governments of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto too tried to sell this leviathan, but could not, given bad economy of the country in those days. He rejected Rabbani's assertion that privatisation would endanger national security, because a separate outfit looks after that aspect.
As for those who called for disruption of the privatisation process, the minister owned his earlier words that they are terrorists and would be handled accordingly. However, to his bad luck Ishaq Dar was there, who lost no time in demolishing the win-win privatisation process as expounded by the minister.
"You undermined the real worth of the PTCL by issuing two GSM licences only a few days ahead of it, and then informed the House that one of these of two licences was given to oblige an erstwhile Centcom Commander General Zinni".
The hurry that seemed to be pushing forward the sale of PTCL was also detectable at another plane, albeit a little differently. And what a hurry it was to set out on yet another foreign junket. Barring the most unexpected, India's future prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, had just said his few remarks and Shaukat Aziz had taken the podium to make his statement, as neatly dressed entourage members, their eyes heavy with the never-ending wait, moved impatiently in the nearby chairs.
Within less than half an hour of Advani leaving the venue, the prime ministerial entourage was on way to the airport for an odyssey. "Westward Ho" this time.
Of course, given diplomatic sensitivity that tends to shroud such visits, the people would never know the real gains the country reaped from these junkets. What little one knows, however, makes them very interesting, and also intriguing. Only today a contemporary has given account of foreign junkets undertaken by President Pervez Musharraf and his three successive Prime Ministers. Between the four of them, from 2000 to 2004 they travelled on to some 105 destinations, spending something like a billion rupees.
Every one of them - along with scores of their friends and relatives - saw to it that he would undertake visit to the holy places and perform 'Umrah'. Here I am not talking of the tours by the ministers, state ministers, advisers and parliamentarians, nor of Speaker Amir Hussain and Chairman Soomro, who must have set new travel records in their own realms.
There is a funny side to these odysseys as well. Long time ago when late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto decided to go to West, the host government, in this case a Nordic country, requested to reduce his 70-plus entourage. It said their people were not used to receiving such large groups of VIPs at one go.
In early eighties, when the government of Brunei Dar-as-Salaam came to know that Ziaul Haq was coming to attend their 'independence' ceremony from the British protectorate, with a 100-plus entourage, it conveyed its inability to host so many guests.
"We don't have so many beds", they conveyed. But that was not to be accepted, given freebooters' irresistible desire to go a place Joseph Conrad immortalised by writing Lord Jim.
They all landed at the tiny airport of Bandar Seri Begawan to be told by the hosts that they would let in only the President, Foreign Minister Sahibzada Yakub Khan and their spouses plus two more. A combination of supple diplomacy and threat to boycott the tiny Sultanate's crucial function finally delivered, but still there were no beds to sleep.
Thanks to the language skills of an information official, the journalist contingent in the presidential entourage, comprising luminaries like late Mir Khalilur Rehman, Maqbool Sharif and Majid Nizami, could be accommodated in an under-construction building.
So elemental was their 'residence' that out of sheer courtesy the three seniors spent the night offering each other the creature comfort of sleeping under the only fan. One also saw how a Nawaz Sharif-led 150-plus entourage descended on London on a weeklong visit, the only high point of which was a cricket-lunch with the then prime minister John Major.
These are just a few of the tales told about the travellers who keep flying out from Chaklala Airbase so often.