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ISLAMABAD, March 12: In an unprecedented protest, opposition senators changed the text of the oath they took as members of the newly-elected upper house at a stormy inaugural session of the upper house on Wednesday, when they also boycotted the chairman’s election.
While the protesting opposition stole the show in oath-taking, which marked the full revival of the Constitution, its election boycott over alleged government coercion against senators allowed the ruling coalition to grab the offices of both the chairman and deputy chairman of the house without a contest.
Former Sindh governor Mohammedmian Soomro was declared elected chairman and Khalilur Rehman from the NWFP deputy chairman after the opposition parties said they were not putting up their candidates.
Later the Senate was adjourned for an indefinite period.
The inaugural session’s presiding officer and former Senate chairman Wasim Sajjad gave oath to members only after speaker after speaker from opposition parties denounced the controversial Legal Framework Order package of President Pervez Musharraf’s decrees amending the Constitution.
Opposition members said they were taking oath under the un-amended constitution as it existed before Gen Musharraf seized power on Oct 12, 1999.
INSERTED OATH CHANGE: As they followed the presiding officer in reading out, sentence by sentence, the text of the oath as written in the Constitution, twice they qualified their pledges to perform their functions “in accordance with the Constitution” and to “defend the Constitution” with additional words ...”as it was prior to the 12th October, 1999”.
However, the senators from the ruling PML-Q and its allies read out the actual text of the oath which has not been altered by a total of 29 amendments made by the LFO.
After a lot of shouting, Mr Sajjad agreed to allow one member each from opposition parties to speak on the LFO.
Senator Raza Rabbani of the People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) gave a poetic start to the opposition assault when he began his brief speech with a couplet by Habib Jalib: “Aisey dastoor ko, subh benoor ko, main nahin maanta, main nahin jaanta (such a constitution, a morning without light, I don’t accept, I don’t know)”.
Mr Rabbani said the combined opposition had decided to take the oath “under the 1973 Constitution as it was before Oct 12, 1999”.
But the presiding officer cut him short at this point, only to invite more shouts from opposition members who ignored his calls for “decorum”.
The chair allowed Mr Rabbani after nine mainly opposition speeches to have the last word, when he said the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to empower an individual to amend the Constitution, which could be done only by a two-thirds majority of the two houses of parliament.
As political entities and representatives of parties, “we refuse that right to President Musharraf or anyone else,” said Awami National Party (ANP) Senator Asfandyar Wali Khan, who had resigned from the party presidentship after the ANP’s rout in the October elections.
MMA’s Prof Khurshid Ahmed, deputy chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami, blamed Gen Musharraf for what he called the “murder” of the Senate by dissolving it along with the National Assembly in 1999, called his rule illegitimate and said the LFO had ceased to exist after parliament came into being.
Babar Khan Ghauri of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement accused the opposition of blocking a democratic process through anti-LFO protests, which he said had deprived the National Assembly of an opportunity to debate the important issue of the Iraqi crisis by forcing the lower house’s prorogation on Monday.
PML-N’s former finance minister Ishaq Dar challenged the sincerity of the ruling coalition’s concern about Iraq and said if the government regarded the issue so important, it would not have prorogued the National Assembly on Monday and would not do the same with Senate later on Wednesday.
PML-Q’s veteran parliamentarian Anwar Bhinder, who lost to Mohammedmian Soomro in his bid for party candidature for Senate chairmanship, said there was no need for an opposition uproar on oath-taking as the LFO had not amended the oath text.
While taking oath, opposition members raised their voices when uttering the additional words “as it (Constitution) stood before October 12, 1999”.
Apparently to emphasize their point, Raza Rabbani, Safdar Abbasi and some other PPP members took oath on an English text to repeat their adherence to the non-LFO constitution.
The ruling coalition appeared to be playing it cool to ensure that things did not go out of control, and kept some of its big guns in the Senate such as veteran jurist S.M. Zafar and former information minister Mushahid Hussain in reserve.
