ISLAMABAD, March 11: After the administrations of two major provinces flung iron fists to block a planned long march on Islamabad, the federal government proposed in the National Assembly on Wednesday that a parliamentary committee find a way out if the lawyers’ protest sit-in could still be held in the capital peacefully at an alternative site.

Interior Adviser Rehman Malik made an apparently belated proposal, citing security concerns, after Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani shied away from personally responding to several opposition members who protested against the ban imposed in Punjab and Sindh provinces on public rallies and what they called large-scale arrests of legal and political activists only a day before the start of the march from different cities that is planned to converge in Islamabad on March 16.

But while the prime minister had left the house before his adviser’s speech, it remained uncertain if Mr Malik’s proposals for a house committee to “work out ways and means to make this protest peaceful” and for a brief secret sitting of the house on Thursday to hear from him what he could not say publicly about “the situation and dangers facing us today” would materialise.

Speaker Fehmida Mirza told the house before adjourning it until 10.30am on Thursday that an in-camera sitting could be held only after a request was made by the prime minister while a key cabinet member, Labour and Manpower Minister and PPP chief whip Khurshid Ahmed Shah said a house committee could be formed only after all the opposition parties, including the PML-N that boycotted the session for the third day running, agreed to the proposal.

Mr Gilani has often won praise even from opposition members for frequently coming to the National Assembly and often responding to matters raised from the opposition. But his reluctance to speak on the imposition of Section 144 Cr.PC in Punjab and Sindh on such a wide scale banning gatherings of more than four people, and instead signalling Mr Malik by his hand to respond, strengthened speculation about his possible difference of opinion with a seeming hard line taken by President Asif Ali Zardari against the promised restoration of all superior court judges sacked by former president Pervez Musharraf and an apparent lack of nerve to assert the prime ministerial powers as the country’s chief executive.

Many members in the house and the media in the press gallery had still expected the prime minister to speak in view of the strong reaction against the action taken by the governor of the Punjab province and the PPP government in Sindh, but Mr Gilani did not return to the house after the brief break for Maghreb prayers.

Mr Malik, who is generally regarded closer to the president than the prime minister, cited only the site of the lawyers’ planned sit-in, or dharna, outside the parliament building in Islamabad for his opposition to the move even though the prime minister has repeatedly said his government would not block a peaceful long march.

But he avoided commenting on the imposition of Section 144 in the two provinces, which would effectively block the start of any march from any town in the two provinces or to reach Islamabad, which is surrounded by the Punjab provincial territory.

Mr Malik said the protesting leaders had rejected his offers of alternative sites rather than the Constitution Avenue for the indefinite sit-in and told the government that they would “go there come what may”.

But he said he still wanted to personally meet lawyers’ leaders like Aitzaz Ahsan, Supreme Court Bar Association president Ali Ahmad Kurd and deposed chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry’s spokesman Athar Minallah to talk about his offer to allow the long march if it remained “away from the streets” and the dharna if it were held at an industrial exhibition ground in the south of Islamabad or on a ground in the H-11 sector near the capital’s graveyard where, he said, they would be welcome to stay for “eight days, ten days”.

But he said the government had grave security concerns if the lawyers’ insisted on “dharna” on the Constitution Avenue outside the parliament building because of the proximity of the site – to which they had brought a similar march peacefully on June 26, 2008 -- to important state buildings and the diplomatic enclave.

Mr Malik also rejected the PML-N allegation that President Zardari had engineered last month’s Supreme Court ruling that disqualified PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif and then Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif from holding any elective public office, that was followed by the imposition of governor’s rule in the province, saying “we did not know” this would happen but he added that there could be a way out by bringing a new law or by seeking a review of the judgment of a two-judge bench provided the aggrieved party appeared in the court.

“I think the blame game should end, and even today we are ready to sit with them (Sharif brothers),” he added.

PML-Q senior parliamentarian Riaz Hussain Pirzada had earlier complained of alleged arrests of political activists in his constituency in Bahawalpur and said the crackdown was a challenge to the prime minister from those “who want to destabilise his government”.

PPP-S chief and former interior minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao called the crackdown a negation of the prime minister’s assurances not to block the long march and said “massive arrests” betrayed “a total divide between the government and the civil society”.
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