ISLAMABAD: Both the government and opposition could face embarrassing questions of credibility about their recent conduct during the National Assembly session opening on Monday, a day after even a muted celebration of the country’s second most important national day seemed hijacked by religious parties.
While the government has not indicated plans to bring any new important legislative business in the session, its planned direct peace talks with Taliban rebels are bound to be on most lawmakers’ minds as would be a $1.5 billion gift from Saudi Arabia that has attracted controversy because of its international implications.
The opposition would like to hear from Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan why the “direct talks” with members of the ‘shura’ of the banned Tehirk-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) could not be held so far though he had said in a speech to the National Assembly on March 7 they could begin “next week” and would be carried on a fast track.
The minister has given no new deadline for the start of direct talks, with the head of the Taliban negotiation committee, Maulana Sami-ul-Haq of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-S, telling reporters on Saturday after a joint meeting with a government committee chaired by Chaudhry Nisar that it would take a few more days for that to happen, though he said the two sides had agreed on an unspecified venue.
The main opposition Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has said it will seek a possibly in-camera government briefing on the peace talks as well as on foreign policy vis-à-vis an alleged Islamabad tilt, which has been denied by the government, towards Syrian rebels seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad, and the $1.5 Saudi billion gift which some critics have linked with the Syrian question.
With questions of foreign policy and the Saudi gift likely to engage Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Foreign Affairs and National Security Adviser Sartaj Aziz and Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, the interior minister could face the brunt of opposition criticism over dealings with the Taliban and a controversial March 7 statement in the house that a senior judge killed during a terrorist assault on Islamabad’s district courts complex on March 3 fell to panic shooting by his bodyguard. That claim was later denied by the guard before a court and lawyers who were on the site at the time of the gun and suicide bomb attack that killed 12 people and injured many others.
It will be a hard task for the minister to wash what the opposition has painted as a slur on his credibility, which Leader of Opposition Khursheed Ahmed Shah of the PPP placed in bitter contention with a statement on the eve of the session on Sunday that “we no longer trust what Chaudhry Nisar says”.
Mr Shah also ridiculed what he called the “big mistake” of not including any political figure in a four-member committee named by the prime minister to talk to Taliban’s decision-making ‘shura’, saying the government seemed to trust only bureaucracy and not politicians, though he said: “For the sake of the country and people, we pray for the success of the talks.”
But Mr Shah’s own credibility suffered badly earlier this month when he led the opposition support to a unanimous passage, on March 7, of a government bill that could have paved the way for the appointment of a former Supreme Court judge and chairman of the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC), Rana Bhagwandas, as a consensus chief election commissioner, but was ditched by leaders of his own party in the Senate and some allied parties on the next day when the legislation was brought to the upper house.
That bill, which seeks to allow a “further employment” of a former FPSC member to a “constitutional office in public interest” by removing an existing bar on FPSC members for “further employment in the service of Pakistan”, was sent to a Senate standing committee for consideration after it was vehemently opposed by some senior members of the PPP, their allies in the Awami National Party and even by the government-allied Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-F.
On the eve of the National Assembly session, the observance of the Pakistan Day provided a stark evidence of where the Taliban-led militancy has led the country.
Security concerns have precluded for several years a traditional grand military parade that used to be held on a ground outside the parliament house in Islamabad and smaller ones in provincial capitals to commemorate the March 23, 1940 resolution adopted by the then-All India Muslim League to form the basis for the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
But an intriguing change this time saw a smaller military parade organised behind the four walls of the presidency to be watched by President Mamnoon Hussain and Prime Minister Shahrif as well as a small flypast, while several religious parties and groups, some of whom had either opposed the Pakistan Movement or did not exist at the time, marked the day with open rallies in several cities, including one in Islamabad by Jamaat-Ud- Dawah, the creator of the banned Lashkar-i-Taiba group.