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ISLAMABAD: In pursuing an apparent new peace with the opposition, the government informed the National Assembly on Friday the two sides were discussing ways to ensure the next elections were free and fair, for which a constitution amendment bill saw a potentially gainful delay for the third day running. The chief whip of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Khursheed Ahmed Shah, talked only about the independence of the Election Commission when he referred to unspecified measures being negotiated mainly with the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), which had on Thursday cited stronger guarantees for free elections as a condition to support the government bill whose original draft seeks only to validate over 20 post-Eighteenth Amendment by-elections.
He said the Constitution (Twentieth Amendment) Bill, which had been on the house agenda for all three days of the present session since Wednesday, was being put off again until Monday for the sake of a consensus with the opposition on likely new amendments, adding: “We want to have an election commission that should hold free, fair and impartial elections.”
But in his speech to the house on Thursday, opposition leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had said his PML-N party also wanted categorical assurances about the independence of a caretaker set-up stipulated by the constitution to oversee a general election, to which Mr Shah made no reference in his brief remarks.
Neither side disclosed the contents of the amendments proposed by the PML-N, which possibly could be about the unspecified tenure of four members of the Election Commission, whose chief has a five-year term.
The coalition government has repeatedly said it has the support of two-thirds majorities in both the 342-seat National Assembly and the 100-seat Senate required for the passage of an amendment to the constitution, though the claim has not yet been put to open test as the previous two constitution amendments of its tenure — the Eighteenth and Nineteenth — were passed unanimously in a landmark agreement of all parties to restore a genuine parliamentary democracy and give more autonomy to provinces.
The government’s original plans for Friday were to begin a debate on the new bill during the day’s morning sitting and take a vote on Saturday. But Mr Shah said the bill, already adopted by a house standing committee, would now be taken up on Monday — when the house meets at 5pm — after Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani announced a parliamentary holiday on Saturday in connection with Eid Miladun Nabi, which actually falls on Sunday.
Earlier, the minister of state for human resource development, Sheikh Waqas Akram of coalition partner Pakistan Muslim League-Q, created a stir in the house when he described the government’s commitments to the so-called war on terrorism as mere ‘drama’ as he blamed Interior Minister Rehman Malik for what he called a public rally organised on Friday in Islamabad by an unspecified banned organisation.
“I record my strong protest against this,” he said, calling the claimed event as a negation of a letter of assurances he received from the interior minister about projected actions against banned groups.
Mr Malik assured the house that he would inquire into Mr Akram’s complaint and take action against people responsible if the meeting of a proscribed organisation was allowed to take place in Islamabad’s Karachi Company area.
The issue was then picked up by a PML-N member, Sahibzada Fazal Karim, who seemed blaming his own party’s government in the Punjab province for allowing a public rally of Defence of Pakistan Council, which allegedly includes banned religious groups, at Minar-i-Pakistan in Lahore but denying the same venue to Sunni Tehrik, and later by a victim of a terrorist attack and PPP’s former religious affairs minister, Hamid Saeed Kazmi, who talked of threats received by the families of judges trying cases against alleged terrorists and called for amendments in the defamation law to protect victims of slander.
The interior minister regretted that a government bill seeking to strengthen anti-terrorism laws had been pending before a standing committee of the Senate for the past two years and said parliament must give a strong message against the menace by providing a better law.
