ISLAMABAD, April 30: Torn papers flew from their desks and their shouts rent the air in the National Assembly on Monday as lawmakers of the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N returned to some wild old ways in parliament to press their demand that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani resign after a Supreme Court conviction for contempt.
Their noisiest protest in the four years of the present parliament, in which members of smaller opposition parties did not join, brought the lower house to a standstill before Deputy Speaker Faisal Karim Kundi adjourned it until Wednesday, just as the prime minister was telling the Senate in an adjacent hall that he was staying in office to exhaust legal remedies available to him.The protest, during which PML-N members also displayed placards bearing slogans “go Gilani, go” and “implement the Supreme Court verdict”, was a flashback of a year of combined opposition protests in parliament against then military president Pervez Musharraf after the 2002 elections.
Those protests, in which the presently ruling PPP and the PML-N chanted “go Musharraf, go” together, had ended after the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) alliance of religious parties signed a deal with Gen Musharraf to validate his rule through the controversial Seventeenth Amendment of the Constitution in exchange for a promise to quit as army chief by a deadline to which he did not stick.
Lawmakers of MMA’s only remnant left in the present parliament, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who sat on opposition benches after being part of the present PPP-led coalition government for about three years, and PPP-S chief Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, did not join Monday’s protest staged by the PML-N shortly after party president Nawaz Sharif announced a decision of a combined meeting of the party’s working committee and parliamentary group to launch what he called a “full-scale movement” to see Mr Gilani’s back.
However, in the Senate, the PML-N took much milder stance by only staging a protest walkout when the prime minister spoke.The PML-N’s move, apparently meant to grab the political centre-stage ahead of the next general elections a year later, came three days after the prime minister had told the National Assembly that he would not give up office before exhausting a legal remedy of an appeal to be filed before a larger Supreme Court bench against Thursday’s ruling by a seven-judge bench and then a constitutional remedy of Speaker Fehmida Mirza ruling against disqualification rather than sending the matter to the Election Commission for a final decision.
But the stance taken by PML-N members made it clear they no more regarded Mr Gilani as prime minister as they began their protest at the start of the question hour by refusing to listen to an answer to one of their colleagues’ question by Petroleum and Natural Resources Minister Senator Asim Hussain, some calling him a “stranger in the house” as if he had lost his position in the cabinet and so he could not speak in the lower house.
The same shouts were repeated as Senator Hussain tried to give some more answers, resulting in an abandonment of the question hour because PML-N members who had entered their question would put them formally in the house and the shouting that made everything said either by the minister or the chair was inaudible in the galleries without the help of earphones attached to the house sound system.
Some PML-N members wanted to speak about the Supreme Court ruling -- over the prime minister’s refusal to write to Swiss authorities to reopen disputed money laundering charges against President Asif Ali Zardari because of the president’s constitutional immunity against prosecution -- rather than asking questions, but the chair did not allow them.
One PML-N member, Abid Sher Ali, from Faisalabad even once made a dash to the rostrum, only to be pulled back by a party colleague.
Opposition leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, who had dared the prime minister in a speech to the house on Thursday to occupy his seat in the house after the court ruling, but was absent when Mr Gilani did come to deliver a hard-hitting response the next day, was not present in Monday’s protest, leaving the shouting and desk-thumping to be supervised by another front-bencher, Khwaja Mohammad Asif from Sialkot.
In the beginning, the protesters only chanted slogans and forcefully thumped their desks while standing in their seats, they later tore up papers, which appeared to be copies of the day’s agenda and printed questions and answers, and threw them towards the stage. While most PPP lawmakers and their allies sat quiet in their seats, one member of the government-allied Awami National Party, Himayatullah Mayar, did rise to remind the PML-N of its past association with the military dictatorship of late Gen Zia-ul-Haq, to be greeted with some desk-thumping from the treasury benches. But the rejoinder from the newly elected member from Mardan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhawa province was drowned out by protesters’ shouts.
PPP chief whip Khurshid Ahmed Shah managed to lay a couple of ordinance and introduce a bill but the chair skipped a scheduled start of a debate on President Zardari’s March 17 address to a joint sitting of parliament and a call-attention of notice of five members of the government-allied Muttahida Qaumi Movement about it called “downfall of Machine Tool Factory, Karachi”, before adjourning the house until 5pm on Wednesday.