There's a world beyond a cabinet berth

Of course many an eyebrow arched and quite a few ears cocked up when Shah Mehmood Qureshi went missing from the new federal cabinet swearing-in ceremony last week. The most likely to be taken in was not there to take oath as the foreign minister.
Of the myriad interpretations of the unexpected development, the one most popular was that he had developed differences with the leadership over the status of Raymond Davis, the American accused of double-murder in Lahore last month that has brought the nation's passions to a cusp threatening the viability of the Pak-US bilateral relationship. A few said that the Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, had used his influence with President Zardari to seal the mouth of Qureshi on this sensitive issue - even when it was the Foreign Office that is to give the final verdict on the question of Raymond Davis' status.
And that may be true, given his farewell address to his officers, in which he reportedly talked in some detail about pressures, from domestic as well as foreign sources, to concede diplomatic immunity to the incarcerated American. But all this hoo-ha was, and is, uncalled for, for in a parliamentary democracy, it's the prime minister's prerogative to allot portfolios. The ministers are expected to follow the policies framed by the cabinet as a collective entity, their specialisation if any and personal charm only as ancillary tools. Any exception to this established practice could be in case there is a tradition of a shadow cabinet, wherein the shadow foreign minister may be asked to take over the same portfolio if his party comes to power in an election. That is clearly not the case of Shah Mehmood Qureshi. We don't have that kind of provision; Hina Khar who had worked as minister of state for finance both in the Gilani and Shaukat Aziz cabinets is now acting as head of the foreign ministry.
But having said this, we are intrigued, if not shocked, by the crude flak Shah Mehmood Qureshi is of late attracting from his erstwhile colleagues. Pointed attacks have been made against him by a number of ministers and PPP officials, casting the former foreign ministers into various molds, ranging from a cohort of General Musharraf to a double-cross collaborator keeping alive behind-the-scene contacts with Sharifs to a PPP renegade, a la late Farooq Leghari. If he was such a dubious character, as the so-called loyalists are trying to cast him into, why then was he allowed to keep one of the most high-profile posts? Surely he is not Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, who Benazir had to put up with despite their profoundly mismatching respective worldviews.
Perhaps, all this accusatory anger stems as much from the perception - aired by a journalist who is known for his right connections - that Shah Mehmood Qureshi is a 'defiant Bhutto' in the making. Indeed there may be some parallelism that is detectable between the two - in terms of personality traits, personal integrity and their revolts against the systems they were a part of. But the similarity ends there; we are now in a very different political milieu where quite a few bright, honest politicians have been pushed out of the main arena by more powerful actors. And, even more importantly, anti-Americanism may be a popular ware to hawk around in the street but hardly a commodity for the customers who matter.
In sum total, Shah Mehmood Qureshi's rather rash reaction to the denial of the same slot in the cabinet is not in the best interests of democracy. He was part of a system that operates within the constitutional ambit of 'collective responsibility', and the foreign policy he followed was not his; frankly not even exclusively of the foreign ministry, which acts mainly as its implementing agency. That he had no publicly known differences with the government attests to the fact that he was part of the system - till the day he was denied the same slot.
Many others, some as close to President Zardari as Raja Pervaiz Ashraf and Qamar Zaman Kaira, were not even considered for reappointment, a fact from which Qureshi should have drawn some satisfaction because he was offered the water and power portfolio. In different times, such a verbal sparring would have been taken lightly as part of democratic system but not at present when challenges confronting Pakistan are too grave to allow individual-specific controversies. In the end, we have a question for ex-foreign minister Qureshi: Has he made his would-be-successor's task less difficult? Mind you, discretion is the hallmark of diplomacy.