ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly meets on Monday to begin a session that is most likely to see some intense sword-crossing before what is billed to be a big challenge to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government on Aug 14.

As political rivals plan their tactics for the session coming on the heels of bitter political controversies during Ramazan, the administration seems making frantic efforts to avoid a feared harm coming to it from the threatened march on Islamabad by Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) on the country’s independence anniversary.

While plans for a sit-in for an indefinite period outside the parliament house had put Imran Khan’s PTI in its bitterest confrontation with the ruling PML-N, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan added fuel to the fire by revealing a notification empowering the government to call in troops in Islamabad in aid of civil power.

Both the PTI march — mainly from Lahore to Islamabad — over which opposition parties are not united, and the notification under Article 245 of the Constitution that they all oppose, are likely to be the main political issues that lawmakers will agitate in both the National Assembly and a Senate session, which is expected to be called next week.

Originally, the PTI had demanded an audit in four National Assembly constituencies in Punjab province by rechecking thumb imprints of voters as a sample to gauge the extent of the alleged vote rigging on May 11 last year.

But while this scrutiny did not happen for about a year amid charges of manipulation by the authorities, things have gone too far by now.

The naming of an all-party 33-member parliamentary committee to propose electoral reforms for the future have failed to satisfy Imran Khan, who recently posed a question that while rival candidates could agree to an American-mediated audit of the entire presidential runoff in Afghanistan, why a similar exercise could not be done in Pakistan.

Though the PTI is yet to announce its final demands, there has been speculation the party would accept nothing short of mid-term elections.

The government’s worry is evident from reported secret contacts with Imran Khan and the unusual invocation of Article 245, although military sources have said no fresh troop deployment has been made in the capital except a few hundred of them posted at the launch of the full-scale military operation in the North Waziristan on June 15.

Nobody took objection to the initial action of calling more than 300 troops to guard strategic points against possible militant retaliation. But the notification invoking Article 245 to debar jurisdiction of a high court in the affected area sent alarm bells, provoking yet to be heard challenges in the Islamabad High Court and planned protests in both houses of parliament.

Spiritual shield?

Meanwhile, the prime minister may also have sought a spiritual shield against his political foes with a week’s pilgrimage to Makkah and Medina — far from the boom of guns in North Waziristan and a relentless din of critics like Imran Khan and Allama Tahirul Qadri of Pakistan Awami Tehrik, whose abandon in forecasts would not see the existence of the present government beyond August.

The coming days could show if the prime minister felt spiritually recharged by the Saudi pilgrimage — as his one-time mentor and military president Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq used to say about himself after his frequent, but much shorter, pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia — and would personally dare his critics in parliament or leave the job to his ministers.

Both the PPP, which does not subscribe to PTI’s ‘dharna’ that Imran Khan says at the expansive D Chowk near the parliament house, and the PTI are likely to raise protest against the invocation of Article 245 at the start of the National Assembly session, which has been summoned mainly to hold a traditional debate on President Mamnoon Hussain’s address to a joint sitting of parliament.

Both the main opposition parties are due to hold meetings of their parliamentary groups before the start of the opening sitting at 4pm.

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2014