ISLAMABAD, March 11: The government on Saturday cut short a National Assembly session in only its second sitting, effectively blocking opposition-sought debates on US President George Bush’s visit and crackdowns in Balochistan province and the North Waziristan tribal area.
Only a brief mention of these issues was made in opposition points of order before a quorum-less house heard an order from President Pervez Musharraf proroguing the session, which began on Thursday and was tentatively scheduled to go beyond March 20.
Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain surprised opposition parliamentary leaders in the morning by telling them at a business advisory committee meeting that Saturday would be the last day of the session, opposition sources said.
But they said he had assured the committee to continue the proceedings until 3:30pm, with an intervening recess for Zuhr prayers, to allow members to air their views on important issues.
However, the speaker told the house later that he would hold only one usual sitting for the day without a break before the prorogation of the house because, he said, opposition members had flouted an assurance that they would allow transaction of other business until noon and raise points of order after that.
But even the promised usual sitting ended soon afterwards when Deputy Speaker Sardar Mohammad Yaqub, presiding over the house at the time, used lack of quorum in the house to read out the prorogation order, without ordering the usual ringing of bells to call absent members to the house.
WRONG ALLEGED: “This is high-handedness,” Raja Pervez Ashraf, secretary-general of the People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP), said about the prorogation.
He told Dawn an “indication” had been given to the opposition that the session would continue until March 24 but, he said, the government seemed to be under “immense pressure” to avoid debates on President Bush’s March 3-4 to Islamabad and the military operations in Balochistan and North Waziristan.
Even a tentative schedule issued at the start of the parliamentary year in November had set this session for March 10-22.
Members of the PPP-led Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) had sent notices of three identical resolutions seeking a debate on the Bush visit, while the ARD and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal alliance were also planning to initiate debates on Balochistan and North Waziristan.
But the chair alone was not responsible for an early end of Saturday’s proceedings as it was the PPP’s Ms Naheed Khan who pointed out the lack of quorum shortly after making a scathing attack on the government for what she called failing to take the house into confidence about the Bush visit, targeting the PPP and PML-N and avoiding debates on Balochistan and Waziristan.
The PPP member seemed to be trying to block criticism of the past PPP governments by a member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, Ali Akbar Wains, who was cut short by the question of quorum just as he referred to the dismissal of an opposition government in the North West Frontier Province in 1972 by then president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
The opposition was also angry as detained PML-N member Khwaja Saad Rafiq had not been brought to the house from Lahore as ordered by the speaker in the only production order for a member he issued during his tenure.
The speaker said the National Assembly secretary had received a fax message from a Punjab government official that Mr Rafiq could not be sent to Islamabad, because no seat for him on an aircraft was available on Saturday morning.
The speaker, who too seemed to be unhappy with the message from Lahore, asked: “Is it so difficult for the government to get a seat on a plane?”
PML chief whip Nasrullah Dreshak apparently tried to pacify the chair, saying he had also sent a message to Lahore and expected an explanation within ten minutes.
But before that could happen the house had been prorogued.
Before tension gripped the house on points of disagreement, both sides of the house unanimously passed a resolution condemning last month’s deadly attacks on two Shia holy shrines and Sunni mosques in Iraq as “despicable acts of terrorism” and calling for bringing “culprits to justice”.
