Dealing with a mind-boggling pandemic.

The sudden surfacing of the coronavirus has indeed crippled the crisis management capacity of policy makers all over the world. To single out our government in this context would not be fair. We are dealing with a mind-boggling pandemic since late February-2020, however. It certainly furnished ample time for devising doable strategies to deal with certain issues of almost routine management of the official business, at least. We surely appear failing on this count.

We claim to be a parliamentary democracy, where the provincial units savor enviable autonomy. Our boastful pretensions clearly required that an emergency session of parliament be summoned to evolve the so-called national consensus for dealing with Corona-triggered crisis.

The Imran government did not bother; for, it clearly believes in delivering solo. Like Trump and Boris Johnson, Prime Minister Imran Khan initially took Corona like another type of Flu, not deserving SOS measures. The frightening scenes in countries like Italy did force second thoughts, especially after realizing that thousands of Pakistanis were returning from Iran, a country seriously hit by the contagion.

To prevent Italy-like scenes, we had to opt for a half-heartedly enforced lockdown all over the country. To evolve a preemptive strategy, eventually a high-powered National Command and Control Centre (NCOC) was established after much dilly-dallying. It began monitoring the Corona-connected scene, with data input from health-related and intelligence collecting outfits. This data helped the federal and the provincial governments to develop a national strategy for dealing with Corona-connected issues.

After the establishment of NCOC, there was no legitimate need to summon the parliamentary sessions in the name of 'seeking guidance' from 'public representatives.' Our opposition, especially the PML-N, loves to act as if desperately trying to assert the 'supremacy of parliament,' however. Through a requisition the government was compelled to call for a brief national assembly session from Monday onwards. Both the government and the opposition took some time in deliberating on how to go about this session, which certainly looked like an exercise in futility.

Parliamentary sessions also require comprehensive coverage in media, especially in this day and age of 24/7 news cycles. Both the government and the opposition were equally clueless about it as well. The beat reporters of assembly proceedings took it for...