ISLAMABAD, March 27: Opposite the main gate of the parliament house is an arucaria excelsa tree, surrounded by fresh poppy flowers. The tablet below the tree informs passersby that the tree was planted by the Senate chairman, Wasim Sajjad.

Like the tree, Wasim Sajjad has always been in the political sun, from the days of the late Prime Minister Mohammad Khan Junejo, whose law minister he was once, but later elevated to office of Senate chairman.

One is reminded of the occasion in 1988, when Wasim Sajjad sat in the National Assembly and new members were taking oath on the first day. One MNA stood up to object that there was a stranger in the House. The then chief election commissioner Justice S.A. Nusrat, who was in the chair, asked Wasim Sajjad to leave the House.

Of course the objecting member was in the dark that Wasim Sajjad could sit in the House as the law minister and that day, Benazir Bhutto, in this case, had not yet been installed in her office. The late justice was equally in error in asking Wasim Sajjad to withdraw from the House.

In 1999 Gen Prevez Musharraf packed up National Assembly and the Senate. Wasim Sajjad was included among the co-signatories in the writ petition seeking an injunction from the Supreme Court to declare army takeover ab initio illegal and void. That must have made Sajjad on the wrong side of the power point.

However, when the General, who had by then ascended the presidency, condoned alleged irregularities of hefty telephone bills and excess use of foreign exchange, as pointed out by the Accountant General of Pakistan in their audit report, it was plain that Wasim Sajjad’s past sins of ommissions and commissions had been forgiven. The offer of a Senate seat was also a sign that Mr Sajjad had cast aside the baggage of the Nawaz League, and like others, was comfortable with the Quaid-i-Azam faction of the Muslim League, regarding it as the right badge to wear on coat lapels.

Before the Senate session on Thursday one secretariat officer on the ground floor of the parliament building remarked that Wasim Sajjad continues to remain as the mainstay of, what Wasim Sajjad, prefers to call as the review chamber, instead of, as the upper house.

The statement was revealing. The truth of the statement was confirmed some hours later when the new chairman Mohammadmian Soomro told the House that the Prime Minister had decided to name Wasim Sajjad to act on his behalf as the leader of the House.

All this goes to show that Waldham Rhodes scholar of 1966 had travelled past the initial difficulties of March 1988 when Gen Aslam Beg owned up that he had sent the barrister to ask the Supreme Court not to restore Mohammad Khan Junejo’s government. Wasim Sajjad, of course, has denied the accusation. The Oxford University, too, protested when the Senate chairman had blocked parliamentary debate on a resolution condemning the honour killing of woman.

All in all Wasim Sajjad had proved himself to be an asset for the government and the new chairman, Soomro, in efficient conduct of a happy Senate.—Jonaid Iqbal