ISLAMABAD: While Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) continued to threaten Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from his sit-in, a parliamentary combine against it suffered another blow on Friday with the National Assembly session ending with an opposition boycott.

The boycott by most opposition parties on the last day of a 12-day session came at the start of the day’s proceedings as a snub to the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) government, reflecting new strains between the two sides provoked by police action against protesting workers of a state-run energy company in Islamabad on Wednesday.

There has hardly been any visible attempt to soothe frayed tempers in three days since the opposition began protesting in parliament against the government’s privatisation policy and the use of batons and teargas by police on a march by hundreds of workers of the Oil and Gas Development Company Ltd (OGDCL) held to protest against government plans to sell up to 10 per cent of its stakes in the company.

The police action against OGDCL workers also provoked warnings mainly from PPP parliamentary leaders like Khursheed Ahmed Shah and Aitzaz Ahsan, opposition leaders in the National Assembly and Senate respectively, that the PML-N’s 17-month-old government could lose opposition cooperation given it to face a perceived threat to democracy from the protests began in mid-August by the PTI and the Pakistan Awami Tehreek which ended its sit-in after 70 days on Oct 21.

The Friday’s boycott of the National Assembly came after two walkouts from the house on the previous day, and two days of rather noisy opposition protests in the Senate that forced the prorogation of the upper house one day early on Thursday.

While Mr Khursheed Shah, who led a token walkout and then a boycott of the house on the previous day, did not turn up on Friday, some other lawmakers of Pakistan People’s Party, Jamaat-i-Islami and Awami National Party lambasted the government for following what PPP’s Shazia Marri called an anti-labour policy before leading members of their parties out of the house together.

As it did on Thursday, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement did not join the boycott, though one of its members, Abdul Waseem, echoed the demand of other opposition parties against privatising profitable enterprises like OGDCL.

Haji Ghulam Ahmed Bilour, a senior ANP figure who was railways minister in the previous PPP-led coalition government, said his party would oppose the privatisation of even presently loss-making railways and Pakistan International Airlines and wondered why police used force against peaceful OGDCL workers while they allowed activists of PTI and PAT to break into parliament’s premises in the early days of their sit-ins.

Contrary to opposition parties’ claims of having saved the PML-N government from a collapse before the PTI-PAT onslaught, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Sheikh Aftab Ahmed responded with his oft-repeated claim that the opposition had begun attacking the government again for the fear that it would get another term in the next general elections in 2018 due to its development work.

“There is something different inside them and something different on their tongue,” he said.

On a demand from Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a Hindu lawmaker of the PML-N, supported by some other party colleagues, that a house committee be formed to investigate complaints of excesses suffered by non-Muslim minorities in the country, Deputy Speaker Murtaza Javed Abbasi, who was chairing the house at the time, ordered a study of the complaints by the house standing committee on law, justice and human rights.

But it was not immediately clear if Mr Vankwani was satisfied as the deputy speaker, immediately after issuing his order, read out a presidential order proroguing the house.

Published in Dawn, November 1st , 2014