THE complaint by the prime minister’s point man in parliament, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, about the PML-N members’ disinterest in proceedings carried weight.

Chaudhry Nisar was said to be furious, though admittedly that’s becoming more of a habit with him, at his party’s legislators’ absence from the house and is supposed to have said he saw no precedence in his long parliamentary career.

While he might take certain liberties with his close, powerful friends, the Sharif brothers, his opprobrium was reserved for the have-nots of the party. He wouldn’t think of targeting his criticism at the prime minister even if the members were merely following the leader.

The senior Sharif’s record of attending parliament is only rivalled by his younger brother and the globe-trotting Punjab chief minister’s appearances in the house from which he derives his legitimacy and authority. Some members of even the treasury in the Punjab Assembly may say in jest that they turn on the TV set when their recollection of how the chief minister looks starts to get hazy.

But I earnestly hope things don’t get so bad that they actually can’t tell apart the Indian, Turkish or the Chinese leaders from their own chief minister visiting them.

A senior PML-N leader and demonstrably a Sharif loyalist, Chaudhry Jafar Iqbal, acknowledged in a DawnNews programme that the prime minister was often absent from the house: “Yes, it is true but see his record against Gilani’s and Raja Pervez Ashraf’s who were always seen in the Assembly.”

Yes, a little over six months into the new government’s term perhaps it will be in order to review its ‘record’. The last government was said to have been a disaster with governance, the economy, law and order and most other key performance indicators showing little that was positive.

Allegations of corruption were seen as another millstone around its neck. On the other hand, it was a weak coalition with some unreliable partners. It had to contend with a recalcitrant military, whose intelligence chief was actively hostile and a judiciary led by an overbearing chief justice.

Thus, when the results of the last election started to trickle in and it became clear that the PML-N would be able to form a strong government on its own, many of us breathed a sigh of relief in the hope that the new administration would get on with it.

While the chief justice continued to make noises about the government’s alleged transgressions of the law, he didn’t really throw a spanner in the works of the incumbents like he often did with the PPP administration.

The military, led by its two-tenure chief didn’t appear unhappy at the poll result and it was clear that its relations with the Sharif administration would mark a dramatic departure from the days of its tense, even brittle, ties with the PPP-led government.

To his credit when Nawaz Sharif made no attempt to form governments in KP and Balochistan when the numerical possibility existed, he began to look like a seasoned statesman with the wherewithal to steer Pakistan out of the mess it was in.

The decision to allow a nationalist-led Balochistan government created optimism that the situation there would improve and the issue of disappearances and summary executions would be settled once and for all.

Six months on some, if not most, of those hopes lie in tatters. From its foreign policy to handling of the security situation to what was said to be its forte, the economy, the record of the government evokes more alarm than it does admiration or envy.

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar is ultra-sensitive to criticism and I am no expert so won’t say much. But it is clear even to a lay person that inflation, deficit, GDP, revenue generation, unemployment are all indicators which look as bad or worse than they did six months ago.

The PML-N’s wholly unnecessary fear that a conspiracy is in the making to somehow force fresh elections, and the fact that cabinet members are vocalising this apprehension, is damaging the party more than anything else.

In Shahbaz Sharif’s previous terms, government officials have acted no better than the chief minister’s poodles, keen on pleasing their master. Could anyone have imagined an open revolt by senior police officers in Punjab to protest against what the chief minister is proposing?

The answer is NO. The senior police officers have collectively voiced their protest at plans to take away some of their key functions as the government creates an anti-terrorism force. The decision is hare-brained and needs to be reviewed.

An equally important issue is that the elite senior cadre of the Punjab police appear to believe Shahbaz Sharif is no longer open to reason, is arrogant and also not the strongman he was once seen to be. Ergo, he can be taken on.

Perhaps the biggest failure of the PML-N is that it has made no attempt to change the narrative about the causes of militancy in Pakistan and the best way to deal with it. It seems to be dithering, confused and tentative. Contrast this with an emboldened Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan that is more aggressive.

All this needs to change. The PML-N couldn’t have had it better. It has now a chief justice who appears interested in administering justice with dignity rather than making the headlines. Mr Sharif has a handpicked army chief who is known to be a professional uninterested in politics.

Security challenges both foreign and domestic including rampant terrorism, a moribund economy, governance and delivery of justice of every conceivable form are challenges that can’t be wished away. They have to be addressed and addressed now.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

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