NA session: govt hard on opposition, soft on clerics
By Raja Asghar
ISLAMABAD, April 25: The government went hard on the opposition in the National Assembly on Wednesday over the country’s prevailing judicial crisis but appeared appeasing to a prolonged Talibanisation threat in Islamabad.
Opposition members sought a detailed debate in the lower house over the situation created by the controversial presidential reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry as they aired some of their ire against the government’s allegedly rough handling of protests and the media -- particularly notices issued or restrictions placed on some private television channels.
The treasury benches responded by a hard-hitting and some provocative oratory and then used its numerical muscle to move a resolution for a debate to condemn what the document called an opposition move to politicise the issue and malign and divide the judiciary to the detriment of "national interests".
Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain fixed a debate on the resolution on Thursday when the house will meet at 9.30am, setting the stage for a hot wordy battle over the unprecedented presidential action to charge-sheet and suspend a chief justice that has outraged the legal community, most political parties and the civil society in general.
While the National Assembly witnessed an uproar of opposition protests and a walkout, Pakistan Muslim League president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain failed to keep an overnight promise to announce a peace deal with clerics of Lal Masjid and their madressah student followers accused of occupying a government-run library and state land and seeking to enforce a Taliban-like religious code first in Islamabad and then the entire country.
The PML chief came to the session apparently to make the statement in light of his latest talks with the clerics in their mosque stronghold on Tuesday night, when he told reporters that the government had accepted "all their demands" and would give details in the house on Wednesday.
But he seemed to have changed his mind after consulting Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao (whose name was inadvertently written as Hayat Mohammad Khan Sherpao, the name of his late elder brother, in a Dawn report on Tuesday’s National Assembly proceedings).
Minister of State for Interior Zafar Iqbal Warraich later told reporters that Mr Hussain would now make a statement on Thursday after what he called a "reconfirmation" of the details of the deal, negotiated amid fears voiced by critics of the government about unpleasant consequences of appeasing mullahs accused of resorting to use of force to enforce their brand of an Islamic code.
Their preconditions for vacating the occupied children’s library of the education ministry near the Lal Masjid and halting their defiance of state authority like seizing and burning music cassettes and CDs and other actions against alleged immorality by stick-carrying male and burqa-clad female madressah students include reconstruction of seven unauthorised mosques demolished by the Capital Development Authority, revocation of a decision to demolish about 80 other unauthorised mosques and enforcement of Sharia in the country.
"What an alim-i-deen (religious scholar) of a mosque in Islamabad is doing," Pukhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party chief Mahmood Achakzai asked, as he complained of the "absence of the government’s writ everywhere in the country" and continued military operations in his home province of Balochistan, and called for a cool-headed debate over the situation, echoing similar demands made by members of the People’s Party Parliamentarians, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz).
But those appeals seemed to have little impact on the other side when Law and Justice Minister Mohammad Wasi Zafar moved the condemnation resolution during an opposition walkout against the Speaker’s decision to allow ministers to lay seven presidential ordinances before the house and introduce five bills before letting opposition members to air their grievances through points of order.
ACTIONS AGAINST TV CHANNELS: Information Minister Mohammad Ali Durrani earlier provoked protest shouts from opposition benches as he accused opposition parties of engaging in an undemocratic behaviour while protesting over the judicial crisis, after assuring the house that the government would protect "all its initiatives for the freedom of press" but pleading against what he called politicising "regulatory notices" issued to some television channels by the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra).
MMA’s Liaquat Baloch and PPP’s Raja Pervez Ashraf and Khurshid Ahmed Shah raised the issue of such notices issued to Aaj and Royal television networks for their reporting of the judicial crisis and alleged blocking of the transmission of a Britain-based Potohari-language Apna Des channel run by migrants from Mirpur district of Azad Kashmir for its reporting about the supersession of Azad Kashmir Supreme Court’s senior-most judge, Justice Manzur Hussain Gilani, by a newly-appointed chief justice.
PML-N’s Saad Rafiq asked the government to make a clear statement about whether it would continue or desist from making mass arrests of political activists as done in Punjab "so that we also chart our course of action" in that light.
PPP member Zamurrad Khan, whose detention on Monday night had provoked opposition protests and a privilege motion admitted in the house on Tuesday, came to the house on Wednesday after his overnight release and vowed that nothing could stop him from taking part in demonstrations in support of the chief justice.
A speech by a young PML member, Sheikh Waqas Akram, condemning the opposition in general and absent PPP stalwart Aitzaz Ahsan in particular provoked most opposition protests.
