ISLAMABAD - In spite of being a veteran of political games, Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani is primarily a sedate type. But he surely surprised me with edgy behaviour during the Senate sitting of Tuesday. Being the Opposition Leader in this House, the former prime minister often asked for the floor to earnestly wonder why the Imran government was so eager to hold a joint sitting of both the houses of parliament, in visibly indecent haste.
The sole objective of summoning the said sitting clearly reflects the obsession of rubberstamping a law, the government has conceived to ensure the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) for polling during the next election. Gilani kept suggesting that the opposition would perhaps have supported the intended law, if it really appeared workable. But the government was just not willing to take them on board.
Pursuing the idea of introducing EVMs with obsessive zeal, the government also seems to have completely forgotten that in the end, the Election Commission has to hold the elections. It is an autonomous body, not expected to act on the whims of any government. And the same body had already put its reservations regarding the use of EVMs, many weeks ago that too in writing.
Dr Babar Awan, the unelected advisor on parliamentary affairs, continued kept reacting to Gilani by spinning the arguments that our traditional politicians loved the old but rotten system of polling for an obvious reason: Over the years, they have learnt all possible methods of manipulating it. They take the new technologies like deadly threats to their absolute control over political games.
Realising that the government was not willing to engage the opposition in serious discussion, Gilani felt forced to eventually decide walking out in protest. All the opposition senators followed him and in their absence the quorum was pointed out. The government failed to prove it.
For establishing the quorum in the Senate, you need to show at least 25 members sitting in the House. The government and its allies claim to have the support of 42 senators. But most of them were missing on Tuesday.
A day before the intended joint parliamentary sitting, such absence surely seemed significant, which could have forced the government to postpone the idea of summoning the same for another time in the short period of hardly two weeks.
I started writing this column at 6:00pm. Before opening the lap tap, I approached many reporters actively monitoring the business in Parliament and the President House. All of them felt literally baffled while telling me that the notification for holding the joint parliamentary sitting on “Wednesday, November 17, 2021 at 11:00am” had yet not been issued. But I kept telling them that the government could not afford to defer the intended sitting for another time. And, I proved right when anxiously awaited notification was finally issued, too close to 7:00pm Tuesday.
Of course, after summoning the joint parliamentary sitting the government has to establish its majority there and quickly get those laws passed, it has feverishly been marketing for many months. The government, no doubt, rules with a razor-thin majority in parliament. It turns doubly vulnerable if a joint sitting of both the houses is summoned.
To ensure the presence of maximum possible numbers on government benches during the joint sitting, Prime Minister Imran Khan continued to hold lengthy meetings with parliamentarians from the PTI and allied parties. A significant number of them were flagged as ‘suspects’ by the agencies diligently collecting hard information for the Prime Minister. I strongly feel that the government had decided to announce holding the joint parliamentary sitting, only after firmly nipping the brewing drift in its ranks.
The confidence loudly transmitted by the government has visibly confused the opposition. After holding a lengthy meeting, the parties assembled in Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) had issued a press release Monday evening. The fine print of it clearly indicated that Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Shehbaz Sharif were still not sure whether Imran Khan had really been abandoned by the quarters sharing “the same page,” with him so far. The same press release also indicated that in the end the parties, assembled in the PDM, might need to approach the courts against the set of laws to be passed by the joint parliamentary sitting.
Seriously suspecting the intent of Pakistan Peoples’ Party, the PDM had rudely ditched the same some months ago. Its leaders felt doubly annoyed when Yousaf Raza Gilani managed to become the Opposition Leader in the Senate. He succeeded in reaching there, when six senators decided to sit on the opposition benches by crossing over from the treasury. If the same number will not join the opposition to vote against the laws, put before the joint sitting of Wednesday, the PDM is bound to once again question the PPP’s claim of being a steadfast opposition party.
I refused to focus on speeches delivered in the National Assembly during its Tuesday sitting. Nawaz Sharif’s loyalists’ continued wailing over a deeply sinister “conspiracy,” they strongly believed was employed against their leader. A visibly belated statement, on oath, by a former Chief Judge of Gilgit-Baltistan, had surely provided them with fresh material to frantically drum the narrative of victimhood.
The Chief Justice of Islamabad High Court had already charged the reporter, Ansar Abbasi, for committing the contempt of court for filing the story of a sensational affidavit. His publisher and editors also have to defend their decision of printing it.
Matters, still under judicial consideration, are normally not discussed in Parliament. But, we indeed are living in abnormal times where the society is deeply divided and extremely polarized.
A truckload of members from Pakistan Muslim League (N) and the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf had thus wasted the whole sitting in promoting their own versions, related to a scandal-stirring affidavit. That furnished a huge exercise in mutual mudslinging, mostly based on telling very old stories and spins like broken records.