‘Aisey Dastoor ko...’
SENATOR Raza Rabbani of the PPP had the first and the last word during the oath taking session of the upper house on Wednesday. But in fact it was late Habib Jalib who had in a way the first word. Raza quoted from Jalib’s famous poem Dastoor (the constitution) in which the poet rejects, to paraphrase his couplet rather liberally, all constitutions which do not reflect the will of the people (Aisey Dastoor ko, Subhe-i-noor ko; Main Nahi Maanta, Main Nahi Jaanta) .
The way things proceeded in the house during the inaugural session, it appeared as if both the combined opposition and the ruling alliance before entering the house had wisely agreed in the presence of the presiding officer of the day, Wasim Sajjad, to disagree over LFO but not to disrupt the oath taking ceremony beyond a point. So they let each other take oath according to their own respective interpretations of the status of the Constitution but decided to continue their fight over the issue within the house.
And true enough, as soon as the oath taking was over, the two, the joint opposition and the ruling alliance clashed over what the former said coercive methods being used by the ruling alliance to capture the offices of the chairman and deputy chairman of the Senate. In protest the opposition boycotted the elections which in any way would have been won by the ruling alliance candidates in view of the clear cut but marginal numerical superiority of the latter in the Senate.
The ruling alliance had seemingly wanted very much to get over with the oath making stage without any undue fuss and the joint opposition on the other hand had seemingly wanted to enter the house without prejudicing its position on the LFO. And the presiding officer helped the two by giving the floor to each one of the party leader belonging to the combined opposition to air his opinion on the LFO. Not once did he insist that the oath that was being administered to senators would bind them to protect and preserve the LFO-ed Constitution. Neither did any one from the ruling alliance mention the LFO by its nomenclature during the session.
Though the ruling alliance appeared almost tongue tied when one opposition leader after the other took the floor to give a tongue lashing to the LFO, still by not joining the opposition in a war of words on the issue, they did help the presiding officer to get through the opening hassle without a big rumpus.
There were three interventions though, from the ruling alliance. But what senator Anwer Bhinder of the PML-Q said sounded like an indirect endorsement of the opposition’s position that the wordings of the oath did not specify which constitution was it referring to — to the one that existed on the 12th October 1999 or the one which contained the LFO. The intervention of Babar Khan Ghouri of Muttahida Qaumi Mahaz sounded more like a self-serving justification for being caught hobnobbing with the GHQ in broad day light. And he actually sounded intriguingly aggrieved by what he said the MMA’s behind-the-scene attempts to contact the Karachi corps commander. He perhaps thinks that now that the MMA has seemingly gone on the other side of the fence it was his preserve to make behind-the-scene contact with the Karachi corps commander.
The person to watch in the days to come is Aneesa Tahirkheli of PPP(Sherpao). She made the opposition members squirm and jump in their seats by cutting them down with: “They have nothing against the LFO. They are just playing to the galleries!” The way she wanted to continue with her taunts and then stood her ground when the presiding officer refused to give her the floor when she wanted to respond to Raza Rabbani’s counter attack, she appeared to be a person with a lot of grit and she has a razor sharp tongue as well. A deadly combination for any house. Watch out, in Aneesa the ruling alliance seems to have found a match for PPP’s thunderbolt Safdar Abbasi.
Another person to watch in the upper house is senator Sanalullah Baloch of Balochistan National Party (BNP). He has a telling style of making his point hit home. On Wednesday when he referred to article 6 of the Constitution while he was taking President Musharraf to task for unilaterally imposing the LFO on the elected members there was hardly anybody in the hall or the galleries who was not affected by the passion with which he spoke.
The man who did the most handshake-and-embrace PR in the house on Wednesday was Syed Mushahid Hussain, the PML-Q senator being tipped to get the portfolio of state minister for external publicity. What a way to go! The other man who seemed equally busy in PR exercise but not relishing it as much was senator Shaukat Aziz. He is so safe and sound that it shows. But then watch out, Shaukat sb. former finance minister Ishaq Dar has also managed to enter the upper house. So, for every figure and data senator Shaukat would quote to prove how sound the economy has become under his management, Senator Dar would bring equally devastating statistics to prove him wrong. The fun is about to begin!