ISLAMABAD: Most opposition parties walked out of the National Assembly twice on Friday in protest against perceived non-seriousness of the government and decided to stay out unless Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif personally came on Monday to brief the house on important issues such as the fate of a disrupted peace process with the Taliban.

The parties, including the PPP and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, seemed frustrated after Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan failed to come to the house for a promised speech to wind up a five-day-old debate on the situation arising out of the killing of Taliban leader Hakeemullah Mehsud in a Nov 1 US drone strike and found most ministerial benches empty at the beginning of the day’s proceeding.

After his protestations in the house and a second walkout, Leader of Opposition Khursheed Ahmed Shah told reporters that if the prime minister did not turn up on Monday, the opposition could pitch a protest tent at a lawn as done by it in the Senate for the previous two days to hold parallel sittings as part of a row over an allegedly wrong reply given by the interior minister in the upper house.

While smaller parties like Jamaat-i-Islami and Awami Muslim League of Sheikh Rashid also joined the walkout, the protest did not attract the Muttahida Qaumi Movement to join the opposition boycott of formal Senate sittings over the interior minister’s refusal to withdraw his alleged wrong reply about figures of casualties from terrorist attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since June.

There was no word from the treasury benches if the prime minister, who has rarely appeared in parliament after being elected to the office in early June, would come to the house on Monday. However, Science and Technology Minister Zahid Hamid, who acts as in charge of the government’s legislative business, did promise a debate-winding up speech on the same day by Chaudhry Nisar. He said the interior minister could not come to the house on Friday because he had to accompany the prime minister on a visit to Karachi.

That was after the opposition staged its first walkout when it had only asked the government to bring its ministers to the house to prove its seriousness and had not made the prime minister’s appearance as a pre-condition for attending the session.

BRIEF JOY: Desk-thumping cheers erupted from the poorly attended government benches when opposition lawmakers, after persuasions by some ministers, returned to the house ending their first walkout for about half an hour.

But the joy proved short-lived after the opposition unveiled its next move, announced by Sahibzada Tariqullah of Jamaat-i-Islami, instead of Mr Khursheed Shah, demanding that the government adjourn the sitting and Prime Minister Sharif come to the house on Monday to speak or the walkout would continue, before the opposition lawmakers stormed out of the chamber a second time, not to return.

But Deputy Speaker Murtaza Javed Abbasi, who chaired the day’s sitting, continued the proceedings, for some more time, allowing Inter-Provincial Minister Riaz Hussain Pirzada to explain his side’s story, complaining of hawks in the opposition ranks prevailing over senior politicians like Mr Shah and PTI’s vice-chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi, and a speech by a back-bencher from Fata, Mohammad Naseer Khan, urging the government to begin peace talks with the new Taliban leadership, before adjourning the house until 4pm on Monday.

The minister had profuse, but apparently grudging praise for the two opposition figures for what he called setting parliamentary traditions, describing Mr Shah as an icon deserving a statue of his built to be placed outside the parliament building.

But he regretted some unspecified opposition “hawks” did “prevail over” these senior leaders behaving like “first year students” in a college.

Mr Pirzada, as done earlier by Mr Zahid Hamid, attributed the absence of most ministers, except that of the interior minister, and many other members of the ruling party to meetings, set for the day, of some house standing committees which became functional only this week with a belated election of their chairpersons.

But Mr Shah had already pre-empted this argument earlier in his speech by asking that if the ruling party members had to attend committee meetings, then why so many ministers were absent.

SHORT OF BOYCOTT: Neither Mr Shah and Mr Qureshi, nor the JI member who announced the opposition decision described the opposition move as a boycott of the remainder of the present session, which is due to conclude on Tuesday.

Mr Shah said he wondered how ordinary members could feel inclined to come to the house if their leaders had made it a habit to stay away. He jokingly suggested that if the ruling party had no hold over its members then it better got rules amended to reduce the mandatory minimum days of National Assembly’s sessions in a year to 50 from 130 to save a lot of money spent on holding the sessions and paying travelling and daily allowances to lawmakers.

Mr Zahid of the PML-N used this suggestion of amending “rules” to have a dig at the opposition leader’s legal knowledge, pointing out that the minimum period of 130 days for NA meetings was mandated by the constitution – which can be amended only by a two-thirds majority of members in each of the two houses of parliament – rather than the easily amendable rules of procedure.

But both Mr Zahid and Mr Pirzada had no answer to Mr Shah’s boasts about what he called “singular” regularity of an opposition leader coming to the house and about the frequency with which former prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani attended the house.

Mr Qureshi, while announcing the first walkout from the house, said that “if this is government’s seriousness” at a time of crisis after alleged “sabotage” of the planned peace with the Taliban by the US drone attack and a controversy over whether the government was really about to send peace mediators to the Taliban leadership only a day after the attack came, “at least the opposition will not be a party to this sin”.