ISLAMABAD: Even in his absence from an apparently weary parliament session on Thursday, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif got a message from an opposition lawmaker that “we will not let you be deposed”.

And a leading senator of ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N said he had never seen a better leader than Mr Sharif.

The pronouncements were from some of the last pledges of allegiance to an embattled prime minister, as well as some digs at him, as the country’s longest joint sitting of parliament came close to wrapping up a debate on the situation arising from five weeks of protest sit-ins in Islamabad by Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf and Pakistan Awami Tehreek parties that want him ousted.

Never before the National Assembly and Senate met in a joint session for so long as the present one, which is to conclude on Friday with the adoption of a resolution against the sit-ins and a speech by the prime minister at the end of a debate that often saw some of his political friends and foes hinting at the possibility of a hidden military encouragement to the protests.

Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Sheikh Aftab Ahmed said in a Radio Pakistan programme later in the day that the joint sitting, which began on Sept 2, would be prorogued on Friday.

In Thursday’s debate, National Assembly member Ayaz Soomro of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), from Sindh, went to great lengths to reassure his party’s support to the prime minister in the face of the sit-ins, which he called “a conspiracy against the Constitution, democracy and the democratic system”.

In a reference to the protesters’ demand that the prime minister resign at least for a month so he may not obstruct an impartial judicial commission probe of allegations of massive rigging in last year’s general elections, he said: “We will not let you be deposed nor to be helpless.”

Senator Mushahidullah Khan, the PML-N’s parliamentary leader in the upper house, too saw “conspiracies surrounding the parliamentary system” in the country and said if institutions like the army and intelligence agencies restricted their role to their own fields, there would be no terrorist attacks like the deadly ones at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi in 2009, at the Mehran Naval base in Karachi in 2011 and at the Pakistan Navy dockyard in Karachi earlier this month.

MUSHAHIDULLAH’S BEST MAN: Talking of the prime minister’s qualities as a leader, he said he had refrained from associating with him until 1989 because of Mr Sharif’s past association with military dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq.

But the senator, who hails from Karachi but was given a PML-N ticket for his upper house seat in 2009 from the Punjab province quota, said that on seeing him from close quarters, he found that he had not seen a better leader than Mr Sharif.

The senator’s was the ruling party’s most scathing criticism of the PTI and PAT leaders during the debate in parliament, punctuated with copious sarcastic poetry, prompting Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq to say at the end of the speech, probably in deference to an opposition peace team’s call for a five-day “ceasefire” between the two sides, that he would have to expunge all remarks found to be unsuitable.

MQM’S DISCORDANT NOTE: Contrary to a total of four anti-sit-in speeches of the day, National Assembly member Abdul Rashid Godail of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement sounded a discordant note, blaming government obstinacy for the present protests, like its initial refusal to register a first information report against a June 17 police shooting in Lahore that left at least 14 PAT followers dead.

He called the protesters’ demands “worth consideration and worth acceptance” and regretted that “some of our imprudent friends” were targeting the army at a time when it was fighting a war for the country’s survival.

The joint session, which followed separate debates on the same subject in both the National Assembly and the Senate in late August, was called on an opposition suggestion as a parallel show of parliamentary defiance of the PTI and PAT sit-ins.

But after some early interest in the proceedings, the repetitive speeches of assurances to the prime minister for so long, without getting a response from him, seemed losing out to daily harangues of PTI chairman Imran Khan and PAT leader Dr Tahirul Qadri from shipping containers serving as their temporary homes in the protest camps.

Even a six-day recess of the session from Aug 11 to 16, given to let lawmakers visit their constituencies, particularly those hit by recent floods, did not seem to revive any interest in the proceedings except for what the prime minister has to say in his speech.

Published in Dawn, September 19th, 2014