ISLAMABAD: There was both wait in parliament on Tuesday for a positive response to mediation from the leaders of two massive Dharnas or sit-ins in Islamabad and scorn for the course taken by them to force a change in government.

Neither any leader from the protesting Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) turned up in the National Assembly with resignations of the party’s 34 members which the party’s chairman Imran Khan said on Monday would be submitted in the second unsettling move in as many days after a decision to launch a civil disobedience movement to press demands for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s resignation and fresh elections under reformed electoral laws.

The PTI has no member in the Senate, which had only a brief debate on the same issue in late afternoon before being adjourned early until Friday while barbed-wire and sandbags fences soon began appearing along the boundary wall of parliament house in anticipation of the protesters coming there at night.

The National Assembly debate was adjourned until 10.30am on Wednesday, but it was not clear if the house would be able to meet if the protesters occupied the portion of the wide Constitution Avenue outside its building.

While senior members of the treasury and opposition benches in the assembly -- minus the absenting PTI -- met somewhere else to plan their next moves after the failure of their overnight efforts to contact Imran Khan and Pakistan Awami Tehrik (PAT) chief Allama Tahirul Qadri, who is leading the second Dharna, it was backbenchers’ day across party lines to criticise what they called an unconstitutional path taken by the protesters.

But most lawmakers seemed more interested on what was happening outside than the speeches on the second day of a government-sought debate on the situation created by six days of protests since the PTI’s Azadi March and the PAT’s Inqilab March travelled from Lahore on Aug 14 and then turned Islamabad into a besieged capital.

As the prime minister, who came to the house on Monday but left without speaking, consulted army chief General Raheel Sharif before troops deployment in Islamabad’s so-called Red Zone, opposition leader Khursheed Ahmed Shah met other members of two opposition-led mediation committees to discuss ways to break the stalemate hours before Imran Khan and Allama Qadri led their followers from their separate sit-ins to march on the high-security zone.

Mr Shah later told reporters that the mediators, mandated by the government on Monday, would continue trying to contact the other side and that “when they give us time, we will go to them”.

He said it was on the “guarantee” of other opposition parties that the government had allowed the two Dharnas to take place, adding that it would be unfortunate if the protesters crossed into the Red Zone, which housed vital buildings like presidency, prime minister’s house and offices, parliament house, federal government secretariat and the Supreme Court, and adjoins the diplomatic enclave housing embassies of foreign countries.

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2014