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ISLAMABAD, March 30: While both the government and the opposition appeared to be shying away from taking a raging judicial crisis to parliament for different reasons, a federal minister indicated on Friday such a battle could take place as soon as next week, insisting that it would not be delayed beyond mid-April.
The parliamentary opposition had a godsend opportunity to whip the government in the crisis over the presidential reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, but it gave up plans earlier this month to call special sessions of the National Assembly and the Senate to debate what has now become a nationwide movement for the judiciary’s independence.
Opposition parties had then feared parliamentary debates would defuse what was happening on the streets in the form of protest demonstrations by lawyers, political activists and civil rights activists against the perceived humiliation of the Chief Justice.
But they now seemed to be having second thoughts, and one opposition source said the sessions could be requisitioned if the government failed to call them after skipping a National Assembly session that was tentatively scheduled to begin on March 26. The government, on the other hand, appeared unprepared to call either the National Assembly or the Senate sessions as it was hardly prepared to face any more criticism of what many ruling coalition members and even some minister were reluctant to defend.
FRANKENSTEINIAN CHALLENGE: Government worries mounted this week with some grotesque shows of religious militancy, including a Frankensteinian challenge to state authority by a religious Madressah in the centre of Islamabad and an assault by pro-Taliban tribal rebels on the town of Tank in the NWFP.
Opposition parties have already sent notices to the secretariats of the National Assembly and the Senate for debates on the crisis. But there has been no such move so far about the Tank attack that was followed by a curfew or about the action of the vigilantes of Islamabad’s Jamia Hafsa Madressah of the once-officially patronised Lal Masjid who kidnapped three women and a child from their house and then seized two policemen along with their vehicles in retaliation for some arrests of the madressah activists for the first kidnapping.
Despite all the embarrassments, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Kamil Ali Agha told Dawn a summary had been sent for President Pervez Musharraf to summon a National Assembly session on April 4, although the session could be delayed for a few days.
He denied that the delay was because of the judicial row and said parliament had already held substantial sessions at the start of the year to justify a long recess.
Asked if a National Assembly session was expected to be held within the first week of April, he said: “It will not be later than mid-April.”
