ISLAMABAD, May 6: Opposition parties in the Senate kept up their onslaught against the newly-created National Security Council (NSC) for the second day on Thursday before the house was prorogued after a three-day session called at their request.
The treasury benches used the ineffectual debate to defend the NSC Act they had passed last month in both houses of parliament and rejected charges that the 13-seat council will mean permanent military interference in political affairs.
The opposition sought debate on "the implications of the National Security Council Act 2004", which began on Wednesday and continued until late Thursday evening, will have no implications for the new law.
Some of ruling coalition members questioned the utility of discussing a law after it had already been passed by parliament, but some others argued the unprecedented debate demonstrated the government's desire to accommodate the opposition viewpoint.
Opposition senators vowed to repeal the law whenever their parties could have majority in parliament. Only those senators were allowed to take part in the debate who had not been able to speak when the NSC Bill was before the Senate last month.
PML-N Senator Sajid Mir proved to be the opposition's most eloquent speaker on Thursday as he denounced the NSC as virtually a permanent martial law and a step that sought to take the country backwards rather than forward.
He accused the country's generals of showing no satiation of their appetite for power, but he said he agreed with the government's argument that the NSC would prevent any new martial.
"When martial law will not go away, how it will come again?" he asked sarcastically. He called the NSC "a death warrant" for democracy and the parliamentary system and said: "We will repeal this black law when we will get an opportunity."
PML-Q Senator Nisar Ahmed Memon rejected opposition charges that the treasury benches passed the NSC Bill on army's dictation. "Where is the army here? We are all elected members (who passed the bill)," he said and called the present one as the most democratic of all of Pakistan's governments.
MMA's Prof Ghafoor Ahmed got an embarrassing interruption from Ms Agha Pari Gul, a PML-Q member from Balochistan, when he accused generals of having conspired against democracy throughout Pakistan's history, including during the abortive 1977 talks between the opposition and then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto before Gen Ziaul Haq imposed martial law.
Ms Pari Gul asked the MMA senator how could he attack the army now while his Jamaat-i-Islami party had joined Gen Zia's cabinet. Others who spoke in the debate were: Farooq Hamid Naek (PPP), Mrs Tanveer Khalid (PML-Q), Maulana Gul Naseeb (MMA), Mrs Rozina Alam Khan (PML-Q), Dr Ismail Buledi (MMA), Anisa Zeb Tahirkheli (PPP-S), Syed Sajjad Hussain Bokhari (PPP), Abdul Razzaq Thahim (PML-F), Liaquat Ali Bangulzai (MMA), Rukhsana Zuberi (PPP), Raza Mohammad Raza (PKMAP), Dr Mohammad Said (MMA) and Mrs Tahira Latif (PML-Q).
Earlier, Chairman Mohammedmian Soomro asked Health Minister Nasir Khan to approach the Sindh government to let more than 90 students of the Sindh Medical College to appear in their examinations pending a final decision about the question of their admission allegedly on the basis of fake documents.
The matter was raised on Wednesday by PML-Q's Tariq Azeem Khan, whose plea for giving permission to the students - mostly from Punjab and the NWFP - to sit the examination was supported by several members from both the treasury and opposition benches.
