ISLAMABAD, March 17: The government and opposition parties seemed still poles apart on Monday over the controversial presidential powers ahead of a special National Assembly session convened for Tuesday mainly to focus on the issue.
Political sources said they could not rule out another noisy scenes in the session called at the opposition’s request as no formal talks between the two sides had yet been held to narrow down differences over Legal Framework Order (LFO).
But a silver lining appeared on the horizon as one major opposition party said it had discussed with the PML-Q the possibility of moving a joint resolution in the house over the Iraqi crisis.
The opposition had requisitioned the special assembly session to discuss the LFO and foreign policy after the president prorogued the house indefinitely last week following three successive noisy sittings.
A source in the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal reported a contact between the PML-Q president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and the MMA parliamentary leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed.
But other opposition sources said no formal talks on LFO had yet been held between the ruling coalition and the combined opposition.
“There has been no progress,” PPP secretary-general Raja Pervez Ashraf, said about PML-Q’s promises to resume dialogue with the opposition.
He told Dawn that there had been some formal government contact with the opposition over the issue since then.
Asked if the opposition parties would hold a similar protest as last week when the house meets at 5.00pm on Tuesday, he said: “On LFO, our stand remains the same.”
While adjourning the assembly on March 10, speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain had said the move was aimed to give more time to the ruling and opposition parties to iron out their differences.
Chaudhry Shujaat went to Jamaat-i-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed’s residence on Sunday and had a meeting with him over the LFO and Iraqi situation, a JI spokesman, Shahid Shamsi, said.
He said the two men discussed the possibility of formulating a joint government-opposition resolution on Iraq.
He said a final MMA stance over the matter would be evolved at an alliance parliamentary party meeting on Tuesday morning.
The PPP and PML-N have also called meetings of their parliamentary parties on Tuesday before the start of the assembly session.
Mr Shamsi said the JI chief had urged the PML-Q leader to impress upon President Musharraf to accept the opposition demand to seek parliament’s approval for the LFO, which among other things empowers him to remain president as well as army chief for five more years, dissolve parliament and sack prime ministers.
“If they (ruling coalition) want to extricate the country from the present crisis and secure its future, they are bound to support the opposition demand for the restoration of the (un- amended) 1973 Constitution,” a PML-N spokesman, Mohammad Siddique-ul-Farooq, said.
The speaker responded quickly to the opposition requisition in summoning Tuesday’s session in a move that appeared to save Mr Jamali from an embarrassment of anti-LFO protests at home while he will be visiting China and the United States next week.
The opposition parties had sent the requisition on Wednesday for a fresh session, only two days after March 10 prorogation, and the speaker could delay the session until March 26, when Mr Jamali — after the proposed three-day visit to China — is due to leave for the United States where he is scheduled to meet President George W. Bush on March 28.