ISLAMABAD, Nov 7: The opposition is planning to resume its aggressive tactics in the National Assembly which will be meeting here on Tuesday after a week-long break for Eidul Fitr.

According to an official announcement, President Gen Pervez Musharraf has summoned the National Assembly session on Tuesday at 3pm.”

This will be the 29th session of the National Assembly which is completing its third parliamentary year on Nov 15.

Talking to Dawn here on Monday, People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) MNA from Islamabad and deputy chief whip of the party, Syed Nayyar Bokhari, said that although the opposition had been cooperating with the government since the Oct 8 earthquake, it had now been forced to call off the ceasefire as the government had not given it a positive response.

Mr Bokhari warned that the opposition would make no compromises and “avail every opportunity to expose the government’s inefficiency”.

The PPP MNA said “the rules of game” in the assembly would be the same as followed by the opposition before the earthquake tragedy. He said the opposition members would press the speaker for taking up adjournment motions which had been submitted and which could not be taken up in the previous session.

The government has been forced to convene the session soon after Eid in an effort to meet the constitutional requirement under Article 54(2) which says “the National Assembly shall meet for not less than 130 working days in each year.” So far, the assembly has met for 125 days and now it has been convened meet the requirement before completion of the third parliamentary year on Nov 15.

PPP MNA from Lahore Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan, during the previous sittings, had lodged a protest over the “manner in which sittings of the house were being convened and adjourned”. He was critical of the government’s decision to convene National Assembly sessions thrice a week only. He also wrote a letter to the speaker and termed it “a grievous abuse of the constitution by regularly adjourning for two days, doing no work and yet counting the non-working days to make the total of 130”.

“If not a fraud on the constitution, this certainly is an abuse of the explanation to Clause (2) of Article 54,” the PPP MNA said.

According to parliamentary secretary of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) Izhar Amrohvi, the opposition members had submitted a number of adjournment motions on the “failure of the crisis management policy of the government in the earthquake disaster”.