MULTAN, June 1: Millat Party chief Farooq Leghari has said if he could fulfil the constitutional obligation of twice addressing the joint session of parliament in the face of opposition’s rowdyism, why can’t a ‘Fauji’ dare to do the same.

Speaking at a seminar organized by an Urdu daily here on Sunday, the former president said the constitution should be regarded as supreme law of the country.

He said if military dictators trampled the constitution time and again, the civilian rulers had also treated it in a similar fashion. He said the country was passing through a critical juncture of its history which warranted a wise behaviour from both the government and the opposition. “I request both the opposition and Gen Musharraf to show some elasticity on their respective stance to end the standoff (over LFO),” he said.

He urged the opposition to avoid confrontation and not to give anybody an opportunity to rollback whatever democracy the country had presently.

ARD chief Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan agreed to Leghari’s assertion that constitution was the supreme law, and said that was why the opposition opposed its ‘subversion’ through the Legal Framework Order which was formulated only to prolong ‘one man’s rule’.

He said a country was a rudderless boat without a constitution. “All military dictators from Ayub Khan to Pervez Musharraf had commonalities such as no respect for the constitution, assuming themselves indispensable to run affairs of the country and the lust for absolute authority,” he said.

He said the army could not play the political role as only the political leadership could inspire the masses on vital issues. “Politics is not just left, right and halt,” he remarked.

The Nawabzada said Gen Musharraf did not want to shed his uniform because he knew that then any adventurer could throw him out of the presidency like he himself did with Rafiq Tarrar.

Earlier, PML-N acting chief Javed Hashmi said the generals wanted to rule the country though the history had showed that they could not perform their duty to safeguard the frontiers of the country.

He said the general had refused to welcome Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee at Wagah during the period of a democratically-elected government and had not accepted the peace process initiated at the Minar-i-Pakistan. But now he was running from pillar to post to restart the peace process. He said it was not the fate of the Pakistani people to always suffer under the military rules.

Former National Assembly speaker Yousaf Raza Gillani condemned the Punjab Assembly speaker, and said during his period as custodian of the assembly when the opposition created rowdyism during the presidential address to the joint session, the then attorney-general advised him to lodge a case against 10 ‘unruly’ opposition members for “attacking the president”, but he refused to do so.

Commenting on the ongoing standoff over the LFO, he said it was the testing time for nerves to decide once for all that who would rule the country — the generals or the people.

Liaquat Baloch said the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal would prefer to take to streets instead of sitting in a ‘paralyzed’ parliament. He said the opposition did not want confrontation with the military, but the army would now have to decide that how far it could go against the people to protect “one man’s rule”. He said if the institution of the army did not take wise decisions timely, even the “awe of the army” could not stop the people to flood Islamabad on the call of joint opposition.

Shah Mahmood Qureshi of the Pakistan People’s Party said economic managers of the present government often boasted of what they claimed macro-economic stability they brought in the country. But, he said, statistics of the international institutions revealed another story. He said the ratio of the people living under the poverty line had soared to 44 per cent, while the unemployment ratio had gone up to more than nine per cent from six per cent prevalent on Oct 12, 1999. He said the ratio of non-performing loans had also increased during the three-and-a-half-year rule of Gen Musharraf.

MMA’s Hafiz Husain Ahmad ruled out any possibility of an out-of-parliament settlement between the government and Majlis-i-Amal over the LFO.