ISLAMABAD: After exhausting its so-called honeymoon period, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government is likely to face hard questions, ranging from economic woes to the state of war on terror, during the National Assembly session beginning on Monday.
The government’s relative parliamentary comfort during its first 100 days in office, completed on Thursday, may no longer be there as the opposition has vowed to flex muscles now despite some extraordinary assurances from former president Asif Ali Zardari, on behalf of his Pakistan Peoples Party, not to create much problems for the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N.
Major immediate issues will likely be the same that served as the PML-N’s stick to beat the previously PPP-led coalition government with -- energy shortages, high prices, corruption and how to tackle law and order, particularly terrorism.
Power cuts remain, though power supply has improved following the payment of nearly Rs500 billion of circular debt to private producers and rains that increased river flows for hydro-electric plants. Prices of everything, ranging from petroleum products to food, have significantly increased over the past three months and little respite in this field can be expected thanks to the conditions of a re-extended begging bowl for IMF aid.
These issues are most likely to be agitated both in the National Assembly, which is tentatively due to continue its session until Oct 1, and the Senate, which is likely to begin one of its own on Sept 23.
Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly Khurshid Ahmed Shah told parliamentary reporters at a recent reception they gave him that the opposition would raise questions over all important issues rather strongly after the government had completed its first 100 days of political honeymoon.
Though the prime minister and the opposition leader have yet to agree on a new chairman of the anti-corruption National Accountability Bureau, the government has made some significant moves to tackle law and order and terrorism, such as helping the launch of an anti-crime crackdown in Karachi by the Sindh government and the prime minister’s success getting the consent all political parties to negotiate peace with militant rebels like Taliban operating from the tribal belt.
But while the opposition Muttahida Qaumi Movement has sought to make the Karachi operation controversial after the arrest of a former Sindh assembly member belonging to the party, questions have been raised also about the wisdom of offering unconditional talks to the same militants -- mentioned in a resolution of the Sept 9 all-party conference only as being among “all stakeholders” -- who have gone back on more than 10 peace deals with the authorities over the past several years and continued blood-letting with an estimated death toll of more than 40,000 civilians and military personnel. New questions about the planned peace talks are likely to be raised in both the houses of parliament following Sunday’s roadside blast of an improvised explosive device in Upper Dir district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that killed two senior army officers -- Swat Division commander Maj Gen Sanaullah and Lt Col Tauseef -- and a soldier.
With the government yet to announce any plan to bring a major legislation in this month’s sessions, Mr Shah had demanded in an Aug 30 speech to the National Assembly that the PML-N implement three unimplemented commitments made by the two parties in their famous Charter of Democracy signed in 2006 -- creation of a constitutional court though an amendment in the constitution, constitution of a commission to probe the 1999 fighting with India in Kargil area of Kashmir, and formation of a South Africa-style “truth and reconciliation commission” before which all parties and institutions admit their guilt committed over the past decades as a means of promoting national reconciliation.
And while Mr Zardari has left the presidency only a week ago laden with some historic honours, including being Pakistan’s first elected president to complete the five-year term, the National Assembly’s new session will provide another bit of parliamentary history for him.
In what will be the first time in the country’s parliamentary history that the house, when it meets on Monday, is to resume an unfinished discussion on a former president’s speech and then adopt a government-moved motion expressing its “deep gratitude” to him for his record sixth address to a joint sitting of parliament on June 10.