ISLAMABAD, Nov 21: The Senate cut short its proceedings at the start of a new session on Tuesday to mourn for former president Ghulam Ishaq Khan, but it was not all bouquets for the man who had dissolved two National Assemblies.
After a prayer, a resolution and a brief reference for Mr Khan, who has also been an outstanding chairman of the Senate, the house adjourned until Wednesday morning when a controversial women's rights bill, passed by the National Assembly last week, is due to be taken up amid likely protests by religious parties.
Tributes came from both the treasury and opposition benches, but opposition leader Raza Rabbani balanced his praise for the mark made by the former president as a bureaucrat and the perceived instructive -- though many anti-opposition -- rulings as Senate chairman by recalling his National Assembly dissolutions and the sacking of then prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in 1990 and 1993 respectively.
If those assemblies had been allowed to complete their tenures, he said, democratic institutions and democracy would have been stronger and Pakistan would not have faced the present situation.
Leader of the house Wasim Sajjad said Mr Khan carried out his responsibilities gloriously, including those as Wapda chairman, State Bank governor, and finance minister and said some of his unspecified "very difficult decisions" as president contributed to protecting the country's nuclear programme.
He also moved a resolution expressing sorrow over the former president's recent death and praising his "valuable services", which was unanimously passed by the house.
Prof Khurshid Ahmed of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) alliance said although he had serious differences with him, the former president had a great quality of listening to other people's views and responding with well-grounded replies and his rulings as a Senate chairman set a standard that could not be maintained.
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sher Afgan Khan Niazi said Ishaq Khan was a steadfast and bold man about whom, like former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, nobody could say he was corrupt or dishonest.
The session made an orderly start as the opposition did not try to mention the deaths of 83 people in an Oct 30 missile strike on a madressah in the Bajaur tribal area while MMA parliamentary group leader Maulana Gul Naseeb led the Fateha prayer for the former president as well as former MNA Mir Darya Khan Khoso and veteran Pakistan movement worker Mahmud Ali.
But a turmoil is likely on Wednesday when the house, meeting at 10.30am, takes up the Protection of Women (Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill that the MMA has vowed to resist as it did in the National Assembly, which passed the draft on Nov 15.
The bill, seeking to protect women from the misuse of the controversial 27-year-old Hudood ordinances about zina (adultery and rape) and qazf (false accusation of zina), must be passed by the Senate to become law.
It will be on the top of the government's legislative agenda for the day. But the combined opposition, comprising the MMA and Democratic Alliance of non-religious parties, has planned to press for an immediate debate on the Bajaur attack without waiting for yet to be called opposition-requisitioned session.
Before the start of the session, more than 100 women supporters of the MMA staged a demonstration outside the parliament building and passed a resolutions against the bill, which has divided the opposition almost down the middle, with religious parties opposing it and the People's Party Parliamentarians supporting it with the ruling coalition.
