ISLAMABAD, July 18: The government has delayed a National Assembly session to August in a move that will spare it, for now, a planned storm of opposition criticism on matters ranging from steel and stocks to power cuts and law and order.
The lower house was tentatively due to meet this week, and opposition parties have been flexing their muscles to attack the government over some of the hot issues emerging after a 21-day budget session ended on June 22.
But parliamentary sources said the government had proposed to President Pervez Musharraf to summon the next session of the assembly on Aug 4, instead of July 17 set in the programme of house sessions in the current parliamentary year ending in mid- November.
There has been no government explanation for not following its own tentative schedule even after protests against such a practice made in the past by members from both the opposition and ruling coalition.
But opposition sources said the latest move was a tactic to buy time to tackle differences within the ruling party and avoid criticism in parliament when a major opposition alliance has threatened to launch a protest movement if the president and his government did not step down by July 31.
Major developments that opposition parties want to be debated in the house include a Supreme Court ruling cancelling the privatisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) and a new turn in the controversy over the country’s March 2005 stock market crash in which accusing fingers have been pointed even at the top of the government.
Also on opposition agenda for discussion are continuing electricity shutdowns, or load-shedding, in Karachi and other parts of the country, the law and order situation, particularly in reference to Friday’s assassination of a religious figure and opposition politician, Allama Hassan Turabi, by a suicide bomber in Karachi, and the July 10 PIA plane crash in Multan that killed all 45 people on board.
The opposition will seek to question the government on why no heads have rolled after the Supreme Court’s June 23 judgment found the sale of the country’s largest industrial unit faulty although President Pervez Musharraf has acted upon a court directive to revive the Council of Common Interests to re-examine the issue of PSM privatisation.
The court ruling will also be cited as a ground for a no- confidence motion against Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz that parties of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) plan to move in the National Assembly next month as part of their anti-government campaign.
Allegations flung at the prime minister and some of his aides in the stock exchange affair during a recent meeting of the National Assembly Standing Committee on Finance and Revenue, but denied by them, are likely to provide further ammunition to the ARD move, about which the other major opposition alliance of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) is yet to take a stand.
The People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP), which leads the ARD, is likely to take a decision about the time of the no- confidence motion at a meeting of its leadership in London on Wednesday, but its alliance partner Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) said on Monday it would be done in the first week of August.
It would be about the same time when the government plans to move a bill in the assembly to amend the Hudood laws enforced in 1979 by then military ruler General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq.
But an opposition source said other business in the assembly could not proceed before disposing of the no-confidence motion.
