KARACHI, Aug 7: People’s Party Parliamentarians’ parliamentary leader in the Senate, Mian Raza Rabbani has said that the proposal to refer the presidential order of the National Assembly’s dissolution to the Supreme Court will amount to introducing the chief justice as a player in the power equation.

It would further complicate the issue and would not be right to allow the judiciary to determine the life of parliament which was the sole repository of making or amending the Constitution, said Mr Rabbani on Thursday at the launch of his book entitled “LFO: A fraud on the Constitution”.

Regarding the LFO he referred to the manner in which Gen Pervez Musharraf, through his “draconian measures” had sought to change the basic structure of the Constitution of 1973 from a federal, parliamentary and democratic instrument into a quasi- presidential form of government, dominated by the military.

While tracing derailment of democratic dispensation during Pakistan’s 55 years of existence, he highlighted how the military and civil bureaucracy had played “havoc” with the civil society and deliberately maligned and marginalized the real stakeholders, the people of Pakistan.

He was of the view that undemocratic and unconstitutional military interventions enjoyed support of the US and some other important western countries.

These days, he said, the federation was passing through a critical phase in history as basic structures were being altered.

He said that one of the many reasons for not bringing the LFO into parliament was that under the umbrella of Article 270 AA and in order to meet the conditions imposed by international donors, financial institutions had been restructured and financial laws had been altered, apart from amending income tax laws, deregulating petroleum prices and subjecting utility charges to periodical increases.

The protection of the economic reforms of the military regime was not a people’s agenda, he said.

It was unfortunate that in Pakistan political questions had been sent to the judiciary for arbitration and in all instances it had interacted with the stakeholders other than those who represented the people, he claimed.

Mr Rabbani said that in the furtherance of their objective the power elite had resorted to compromise, corruption, abuse of power and nepotism.

Mr Rabbani said that in the political history of Pakistan, politicians could not be solely blamed for the system’s failure. On the contrary, at times the politicians were the victim of the nexus between the civil-military bureaucracy, assisted by judgments rendered by certain individuals in the judiciary, he said.

There also existed a nexus between the civil military bureaucracy and the right-wing religious parties, he said.

Ever since Pakistan came into being, two members of the power lobby, the civil-military bureaucracy and the fundamentalists, had initiated and maintained a systematic and scientific campaign against political workers to monopolize policy formation and the decision making process, said Mr Rabbani.

He said that repeated failures on the part of the power elite to arrive at equilibrium with the genuine representatives of the people had resulted in the form of evils such as bank loan defaulters, feudal lords and drug mafia.

The purpose of the book was not to blame any single stakeholder but to arrive at a correct synthesis to build anew, which was only possible if each individual and institution in the power equation of Pakistan admitted in public to its role in betraying the will of the people, he said.