ISLAMABAD: Breaking a long silence about the worst challenge to his government, an apparently defiant Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to a supportive National Assembly on Wednesday to stand by his oath to defend the Constitution, but gave no way out of a deadlock with protesters besieging parliament and seeking his ouster.

“We are not the ones who will be afraid of such things,” he said of two weeks of protests starting with marches from Lahore to Islamabad by tens of thousands of supporters of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) and Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PTI) on Aug 14 that were followed by days of their sit-ins in the capital and a siege of parliament for a full week now.

Coming a day after discussing the prevailing situation with army chief Gen Raheel Sharif, this was the prime minister’s first speech to the house since it began a debate on the issue on Aug 18 and six days after it passed a resolution unanimously – minus the boycotting 34-seat PTI and some of its allies – rejecting what it called unconstitutional demands for his resignation and dissolution of the 342-seat assembly.

Citing the oath he has taken to defend the Constitution, the prime minister said: “God-willing I will never hurt your sentiments, and God-willing I will not let my oath to be hurt.”

In a 20-minute speech in Urdu, he voiced his “full confidence and belief” that “Pakistan will continue its journey of Constitution and law” and development plans charted by his nearly 15-month-old government uninterrupted, saying: “The march of progress will go on and this thing will pass away.”

But the prime minister gave out little about how he planned to break the impasse in talks with the protesters through his ministers and mediators, mainly over the two most sticking points: a revised PTI demand that he resign for at least a month to allow a free judicial probe of allegedly massive rigging in last year’s general elections and a PAT demand that the police entertain its first information report (FIR) accusing him and his brother and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif of responsibility in a June 17 police shootout in Lahore which left 14 PAT activists, including women, dead.

However, Mr Sharif promised to speak to the house at an “appropriate time” and “when something tangible comes out” about “why and how all this started”.

Railways Minister Khawaja Saad Rafique, asked by the prime minister to inform the house about the progress of the dialogue and what demands had been accepted and offering any hope of a breakthrough, asking how Pakistan could be run if the prime minister resigned, though a Senate member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N, Chaudhry Jaffer Iqbal, told a private television channel that he had sent a letter to Mr Sharif suggesting the creation of the office of a deputy prime minister like the one in the previous coalition government of Pakistan People’s Party.

Mr Rafique also cited a rather surprising hitch to the registration of the FIR about the Lahore shootout despite an order by a Lahore additional sessions judge, which was upheld by the Lahore High Court on Wednesday, that it be done.

The minister asked PAT chief Allama Tahirul Qadri to exclude the names of unspecified “innocents” from the PAT list of the accused so that the FIR could be registered and also gave him the option of pursuing the case under the normal criminal law or Sharia, which seemed a reference to the possibility of settling the case by paying ‘diyat’, or blood money, allowed under the Islamic law.

The prime minister has been attending the house most of the days during a government-sought debate on the situation since Aug 18, but had preferred to keep quiet even after the protesters laid a siege to the parliament house in the early hours of Aug 20.

Not many people expected him to come on Wednesday when the house met with a thin attendance while PAT activists outside had begun digging symbolic graves at the protest site and some of them came out wearing white ‘kafans’ (shrouds), as a sign of readiness to face police bullets in the event of a confrontation.

But despite an apparently sombre situation outside, Mr Sharif entered the house midway through the proceedings to cheers from PML-N members, most of whom later crowded his desk apparently to reassure him of their loyalty.

It was after hearing a couple of opposition speeches against the protest sit-ins -- with former railways minister Ghulam Ahmed Bilour of the Awami National Party calling the standoff “Punjab fighting Punjab – that Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq gave the floor to Mr Sharif, who began his speech with offering belated thanks to the house for its Aug 21 resolution that he called “the voice of the 20 crore people of Pakistan” and a “victory of democracy”.

While referring to at least four, until then fruitless, meetings with PTI and seven with the PAT – the minister said “all six demands” of PTI had been accepted – including electoral reforms and a judicial probe of poll-rigging allegations -- except for the prime minister’s resignation.

Promising that all “doable” PAT demands could be brought to parliament for legislation, he made the Lahore shooting FIR conditional to the exclusion of “innocents”.

Calling on the protesting parties to keep their doors open for dialogue and provide the government negotiators direct access to Imran Khan and Allama Qadri, the minister ruled out any crackdown against the protesters.

He also informed the house of a directive by the prime minister to his party members against holding counter rallies, as had happened on Tuesday.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2014

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