Islamabad, Jan 25 (IANS) Pakistan’s opposition parties have requisitioned a special session of the Senate after the interim government refused to convene the house to apparently avoid criticism over issues like the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and food shortages.
Senate acting chairman Jan Mohammad Jamali has till Feb 7 to summon the session, for which the combined opposition has set a six-point agenda that also includes the deteriorating law and order situation and inflation.
Under the constitution, the 100-member upper house has to sit for at least 90 days during a parliamentary year that ends March 11.
“But this time, the house has met for only 35 days and it has become impossible to have 55 more days of session while only 47 days are left for the parliamentary year to end,” Dawn reported Friday.
According to leader of the opposition in the Senate Raza Rabbani, this was a “conscious attempt to stifle parliament” even as house chairman Mohammedmian Soomro is the interim prime minister and could well advise President Musharraf to summon the chamber.
“This follows a similar deviation – for which there is no prescribed penalty – by the previous PML (Pakistan Muslim League) government which quit Nov 15 after completing its five-year term and letting the National Assembly stand dissolved for the same reason without completing 130 mandatory days of session in its last parliamentary year,” Dawn noted.
“The caretaker government deliberately and with malafide intent has once again violated mandatory provision of the constitution,” Rabbani said in a statement after the requisition signed by 39 opposition Senators – more than the required 25 – was delivered to the upper house secretariat Thursday. “This is a conscious attempt to stifle parliament.”
Rabbani, who is also the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) parliamentary group in the Senate, denounced the government for what he termed having “thrown to the winds Pakistani cultural and democratic traditions” by failing to call a Senate session after Bhutto’s assassination Dec 27 to let the house pass an obituary reference for the slain leader.
“The total collapse of law and order and the ‘atta’ (flour) scam which found its beginning in the regime of (former prime minister) Shaukat Aziz is haunting the nation today,” he said.
“If the Senate, which represents the federation and its people, cannot meet to take stock of this grave situation – and today the federation itself stands under severe threat – then history will remember this house in unkind terms,” Rabbani added.