June 6, 2003	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 5, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, June 5: As there has been no accord to settle the controversy on sweeping presidential powers, the opposition parties on Thursday seemed poised to shout down the federal budget for fiscal 2003-04, when it is presented before the National Assembly on Saturday.

Though Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz has promised to impose no new taxes— but to broaden the tax base— in the first budget of Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali’s seven-month-old government, the opposition will only keep up its protest against the controversial Legal Framework Order (LFO) that gives sweeping powers to President Pervez Musharraf.

Opposition sources said there could be a change of tactics if the government made any new move on the affair, which has been marked in the past one-month talks between the two sides by a succession of disappointments and renovated hopes.

But any chances of opposition changing its stance before the budget to allow the finance minister’s financial proposals to be passed in a normal fashion were dimmed by the eruption of a new row between the federal government and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) alliance’s government in the NWFP.

Last week’s barring of protesting opposition members from the Punjab Assembly and their subsequent arrests and alleged manhandling by police will only add to the opposition fury in parliament, the opposition sources said.

Parliamentary groups of the combined opposition, which also includes the People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League-N, are due to meet separately on Friday and jointly the next day to draw up their line of action for the budget session.

PROTEST TO CONTINUE: MMA leader Liaqat Baloch said the opposition protest— manifested by chanting anti-LFO slogans in the previous National Assembly and Senate sessions— would continue if there was no settlement on the issue.

“It will continue in the same way,” PML-N acting president Makhdoom Javed Hashmi told Dawn .

“If they (the government) replay the Punjab action, we are ready for that as well,” he said referring to the incidents at the Punjab Assembly in Lahore where PPP and PML-N members of the provincial assembly were targeted for their anti-LFO protests.

A PPP spokesman, Senator Farhatullah Babar, said the combined opposition still bound by its previous decision not to allow any legislative business in parliament until a settlement was reached on the LFO.

But he said, the final decision on the strategy during the budget sessions of the National Assembly and the Senate would be taken by a joint meeting of the leaders of opposition parliamentary groups on Saturday.

If the government succeeded in winning over any opposition group, as speculated in newspapers, “the game will be different”, he said.

NEW FUEL TO FIRE: The federal government’s threatened “administrative action” to curb the alleged law and order problems created by MMA’s fervour to enforce its brand of Shariat has so far been translated into change of the sensitive province’s top bureaucrat and police chief.

But the mere federal challenge to the six-party religious alliance’s new-found political preserve, coupled with an allegedly engineered virtual revolt by local government chiefs in all the province’s 24 districts seems to have added fuel to the fire and sparked charges of arm-twisting to force the MMA to compromise on the LFO.

Saturday’s National Assembly and Senate meetings, called by the president for 3pm and 5pm respectively on Saturday, will be their first since the 342-seat lower house was prorogued on April 30, to allow the ruling and opposition parties to resolve their differences over the LFO, and the 100-seat upper house was prorogued on April 18, after the longest uproar in the country’s parliamentary history.

Though the budget will be presented before the National Assembly, the LFO provides that its copy must simultaneously be transmitted to the Senate, which may send its non-binding recommendations on the finance bill to the lower house within seven days.

A series of meetings of the joint parliamentary committee on the LFO presided over by National Assembly Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain last month culminated in only separate recommendations submitted by the parties to him who, in turn, compiled his own report and handed it to the prime minister.

But Mr Jamali has yet to invite party leaders to a promised meeting to resolve the issue after the president’s reported rejection of the opposition demand that he immediately gives up his post of the chief of army staff and seeks presidential election as a civilian from an electoral college, comprising both houses of parliament and the four provincial assemblies.