ISLAMABAD, Feb 19: The ruling and opposition parties spoke with one voice in the National Assembly on Monday against a recent wave of suicide bombings and called for a better law and order in the country, but failed to remedy their own disorder that once again cut short house proceedings for lacking quorum.

The house unanimously passed what were described as two jointly drafted resolutions, one of them expressing the members’ concern over the violence they linked to “internal and external conspiracies” and the other calling for a halt to excavations near the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by Israeli archaeologists.

But the unanimity in the two drafts was in sharp contrast to what otherwise happened in the troubled house – announced and unannounced opposition walkouts and the ruling coalition’s failure to maintain the quorum – before Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain adjourned the proceedings until 9am on Tuesday after two head counts showed not enough members were present to enable a government minister to move a scheduled bill.

After it began its present session on Jan 6, the 342-seat house kept the quorum of its one-fourth or 86 members only on Thursday that the government used to rush through a record four bills for a single day. All other 10 sittings had lacked quorum, though it was not pointed out on the opening day when the house was adjourned without taking up any business to mourn the recent death of an opposition member.

On Monday, the People’s Party Parliamentarians boycotted the remainder of the day after the question hour to protest against what it called the failure of police to register an FIR about gunfire on one of its assembly members, Azra Fazal Pechuhu, during a by-election for a Sindh provincial assembly seat in Jamshoro on Feb 10.

Minister of State for Interior Zafar Iqbal Warraich, quoting

information from the Jamshoro district police chief, told the house that the FIR had not been registered because Dr Azra, a sister-in-law of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, had filed a petition before the sessions court there instead of reporting the matter to the concerned police station, which he said was awaiting the court order in the matter.But Dr Azra said she went to the sessions court after the district police chief and the local station house officer failed to register the FIR because a provincial minister, Altaf Unar, was named for the shooting on her bullet-proof car that she said was aimed to kill her.

PPP members stormed out of the house in protest while, on a query form the chair, both sides were arguing whether an FIR could be registered without a formal complaint to a police station by an aggrieved party.

PPP secretary-general Raja Pervez Ashraf later told a news conference that his party members would boycott the proceedings every day after the question hour until an FIR about the Feb 10 attack was registered.

Members of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal staged an unannounced walkout after one of them persuaded the speaker to ask a government minister and another ruling coalition member to bring the PPP back to the house.

Only three PPP members returned and one of them pointed out the lack of quorum just as Science and Technology Minister Chaudhry Noraiz Shakoor Khan stood up to move for taking up the National Institute of Oceanography Bill to provide for the establishment of a National Institute of Oceanography as recommended by a joint mediation committee of both houses of parliament.The chair suspended the house after the first count and adjourned it until Tuesday after a second count showed only 76 members were present, 10 short of the quorum.

The resolution on the law and order, moved by MMA member Qari Gul Rehman, condemned “the increasing incidents of terrorism and sabotage as a whole and particularly the incidents of suicide bombing in Quetta, Peshawar, and Islamabad” and said “every citizen of Pakistan is perturbed at the internal and external conspiracies to destabilise the country and destroy peace”.

It said killing innocent people by suicide bombings “is not only inhuman but also un-Islamic” and demanded that the government take “concrete and cogent measures to maintain law and order and address the causes of terrorism and hidden motives behind these acts”.

The second resolution, moved by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sher Afgan Niazi, condemned what it described as damages caused to the Al-Aqsa mosque and said the act was part of a “Jewish conspiracy” to demolish the mosque and had hurt the feelings of and amounted to a challenge to the whole Muslim world.

“This session of the National Assembly demands of Israel to immediately stop the digging process and compensate for the damages caused to the mosque,” it said.

The resolution also demanded calling an immediate summit meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Conference to take up the matter and evolve an “effective future course of action”.