MULTAN, April 3: The Pakistan People’s Party does not want to initiate legal proceedings against its defectors before judges who have yet to take oath under the ‘restored’ Constitution.
This was stated by former speaker of National Assembly and PPP vice-chairman Yousaf Raza Gilani while talking to Dawn here on Wednesday.
“Seeking help of the court will stamp that we have accepted the judges who are still working under the oath of Provisional Constitutional Order,” he said.
He said how the party could expect justice from the state machinery under the regime’s rule when the Election Commission had registered P-5 (patriot faction of the PPP) after the general election despite the fact that all the defectors who joined P-5 contested elections on the PPP ticket.
He said military rulers held defection clause of the Constitution in abeyance till the completion of parliament in order to cobble a government of hand-picked people. “We have issued show-cause notices to the defectors, but winning their disqualification under the circumstances is rather impossible,” he said.
He said his party would neither accept the Legal Framework Order nor the ‘redundant’ National Security Council. “Nowhere in a democratic world, an elected prime minister can be made answerable to a grade-22 government employee,” he said.
The former speaker said election of a new president was a constitutional obligation after the completion of parliament, and this should be fulfilled so as to avoid deepening of the constitutional crisis.
On the reported demand of PML-Q chief Shujaat Husain that the Accountability Bureau should be headed by a member of the judiciary, Mr Gilani said when he was NA speaker, a bill was tabled on the floor of the house to declare that no executive could head the Accountability Bureau, and that the chief of the bureau should be selected from among a panel of serving or retired judges (of superior courts), forwarded jointly by the government and the opposition. But before the bill could be passed, the then government and the assemblies were dissolved.
He said above-the-board accountability required credibility of the institution, and in no case it should be headed by a man in uniform.
He said there was a thin line between the accountability and the victimization which could be overlapped for ulterior motives, especially by the ‘dictators’.
About the rise of ‘religious activism’ in the country, the PPP leader said it was because of the vacuum created by the junta by sidelining the two mainstream political parties — the PPP and the PML-N. The establishment did not even want to see the two parties in the role of opposition as now the government held talks on vital issues like the LFO only with the MMA.
He said the component parties of the MMA and other regional political parties had been contained to the emerging two-party system in the country before the Oct 12 military takeover.
Dissipating the impression that the MMA was gaining popularity in the Punjab as well by channelizing public resentment through its million-man march, Mr Gilani said it was a temporary phase.
He said it was wrong to suggest that his party had no elucidated stand on war in Iraq. He said the PPP was against the use of force without the UN approval.
Terming the foreign policy of the government a failure, he said despite accepting all American demands, the regime had failed to win over the confidence of the Bush administration.