ISLAMABAD, Jan 24: The opposition on Thursday requisitioned a special session of the Senate after the interim government evaded one in defiance of the Constitution apparently to avoid a potential storm of criticism over hot issues such as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and food shortages.
Senate acting chairman Mir Jan Mohammad Jamali has up to two weeks until Feb 7 to summon the session, for which the combined opposition has set a six-point agenda, which seeks debates also on the country’s poor law and order situation, inflation and shortages of essential commodities like wheat flour, and the aftermath of the now-lifted emergency that President Pervez Musharraf had enforced on Nov 3 in his capacity as army chief.
The Constitution requires the 100-seat upper house to be in session for at least 90 working days during a parliamentary year. But this time, the house has met for only 35 days and it has become impossible to have 55 more days of session while only 47 days are left for the parliamentary year to end on March 11.
What opposition leader in the Senate Mian Raza Rabbani called a “conscious attempt to stifle parliament” happened while Senate Chairman Mohammedmian Soomro himself is interim prime minister and could advise President Musharraf to summon the Senate.
This follows a similar deviation — for which there is no prescribed penalty — by the previous PML government which quit on Nov 15 after completing its five-year term and letting the National Assembly stand dissolved for the same reason without completing 130 mandatory days of session in its last parliamentary year.
“The caretaker government deliberately and with mala fide intent has once again violated mandatory provision of the Constitution,” Mr Rabbani said in a statement after the requisition signed by 39 opposition Senators — more than the required 25 — was delivered to the upper house secretariat on Thursday.
“This is a conscious attempt to stifle parliament.”
Mr Rabbani, who is also the leader of PPP parliamentary group in the Senate, denounced the government also for what he called having “thrown to the winds Pakistani cultural and democratic traditions” by failing to call a Senate session after Ms Bhutto’s assassination in a gun-and-bomb attack in Rawalpindi on Dec 27 so the house could hold a reference for the dead PPP leader and former prime minister.
“The total collapse of law and order and the atta scam which found its beginning in the regime of (former prime minister) Shaukat Aziz is haunting the nation today,” he said. “If the Senate, which represents the federation and its people, cannot meet to take stock of this grave situation — and today the federation itself stands under severe threat — then history will remember this house in unkind terms.”
