ISLAMABAD: Police are least bothered when parliamentarians call each other corrupt, cheat and robbers, but it does become a police matter when their suites in the Parliament Lodges are burgled.
Late last month the Islamabad police decided to clean sweep the lodges after receiving a series of complaints of thefts from MNAs, senators or their guests staying in the lodges, or their visitors. However, the police had screened the occupants of just 25 of the 125 servant quarters when howls of protests from other parliamentarians made them stop the exercise.
Little of value was stolen in the seven cases of thefts reported to the police in the past two months – except for two laptops, a motorcycle and a rifle. The laptops belonged to MNA Kashmala Tariq and Senator Surayya Amiruddin, the motorcycle to a stenographer and the rifle to a joint secretary of the government, related to a PML-N MNA but staying in the suite of some other legislator.
Otherwise what the thieves took away, such as mattresses and gas heaters, was government property.
As the thieves did not break into the suites but used duplicate keys or open windows to enter them, the police believed it to be inside jobs – and so decided on screening the people associated with the allottee parliamentarians. But the resistance that came from the legislators to the exercise surprised the police.
When Dawn contacted Kashmala Tariq the day after her laptop was stolen on April 3, she termed the crime “a security lapse” on the part of all departments.
“A trespasser can even kill a legislator some day,” she said.
Police told her that they had submitted a security plan for the Parliament Lodges two years ago but neither the office of the Speaker of National Assembly nor the Capital Development Authority responded to it.
She, however, seemed to recognise the problems posed by outsiders living in the lodges by disclosing that suites of the lawmakers who agreed to security check of their visitors at the entrance were separated from those who objected to the checksbecause of their “dubious activities” in the lodges.
What the activities were she left unsaid. But a few reports from the past indicate what they could be.
On April 2, 2009, the Islamabad police recovered 30 grams of marijuana from a car in a routine check at Daman-i-Koh resort.
The next day a group of parliamentarians descended on Rehman Malik, then adviser to the prime minister on interior, demanding how dare the police intercept a car bearing the plate ‘MNA’?
In June the same year, and similar road check, the police recovered two crates of beer cans from a car, with a government green plate, which was in the use of a woman senator. She claimed she had borrowed the car from a Balochistan senator and knew nothing about the crates. When the Baloch denied her claim, she pinned the toxic stuff on a naib qasid of the Senate Secretariat who she claimed was “given lift” by her driver.
Unlike the two incidents, the Federal Lodge was the scene of the most recent of such events.
On March 25, 2011 the legislators lodged were watching the cricket World Cup semi-final between India and Pakistan in the compound when an MNA representing the minorities drove in and parked his car. That annoyed the brother of a legislator and a brawl ensued. It is alleged the brother was “not in his senses”.
It were not such quirky events, however, that weighed on the minds of the members of the Library Committees of the two houses of parliament when they met to consider the security arrangements at the Parliament House and Lodges in May 2011.
They directed the police to beef up security and disallowed entry into the two hallowed grounds without a pass and security check.
They also asked the secretariats of the National Assembly and the Senate to write letters to the parliament members to cooperate with the security personnel in carrying out their new directives.
But the receivers of those letters have acted more in defiance than honouring its contents. And poor police remain at the receiving end of the ire of all.