Would ‘meaningful’ consultation do the job?

Without taking PML-N on board, PPP-led coalition would not dare to ask for vote on the proposed amendment.

After many days, benches on both sides of the house were found filled to near capacity Wednesday evening. None of the parliamentary reporters were interested to sit in the press gallery, however, except those specifically assigned to report on the question hour of the National Assembly. Most of them kept standing outside the chambers of Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan.

Until my leaving the parliament house, there appeared no credible hint to instill hope for a positive outcome.

Two well informed ministers believed otherwise. They claimed that the PML-N was now opening eyes to see downsides of not helping the government in getting out of a trivial-looking impasse. “Nisar will be managed in the end,” they said with confidence.

In his room, the opposition leader was holding another round of negotiations with government emissaries. They had been trying to reach agreement on a final draft of a constitutional amendment to validate election of 28 members of various legislative houses. They had returned to elected houses through bye-elections, which the Supreme Court eventually found were held under an incomplete, thus unconstitutional, Election Commission. Instead of unseating these legislators, the court suspended their membership to facilitate provision of a constitutional cover.

If you consider the numbers only, the Zardari-Gilani government can provide the proposed cover by mustering the 2/3rd majority for amending the constitution. It is a fragile coalition, though, where the allied parties had developed the tendency of playing hard to get.

One of its major allies, the PML-Q, remains miserably divided. Its all-chiefs-no-Indian type members habitually act solo for self-centric reasons. So many hearts within the PPP also keep burning with envy and feeling ignored or sidelined by President Zardari.

Without taking the PML-N on board, therefore, the PPP-led coalition would not dare to ask for vote on the proposed amendment. It will but expose its numerical strength with a scandalous bang.

The parliament-hardened Chaudhry Nisar fully fathoms the weak sides of this government. No wonder, despite sincere efforts by a pragmatic but not so dovish Ishaq Dar, he kept sticking to the demand that while getting the 20th amendment passed, the government should also insert more clauses into it. The clauses he kept pressing for were aimed at forcing the government to commit formation of an independent election commission. The government was more than willing to meet this demand. Its emissaries started having second thoughts, however, when he also began demanding that the interim prime minister of the government for holding elections should be named through ‘consensus’ between the outgoing prime minister and the opposition leader in the National Assembly.

The much-trumpeted 18th amendment had envisaged this appointment via ‘consultations’ between the two. Nisar keeps telling the government emissaries that while appointing the Chairman of National Accountability Bureau, the government paid two hoots to the notion of consultation. Therefore, he cannot trust it anymore; especially when a “wily Asif Ali Zardari is sitting in the presidency.”

Both Raza Rabbani and Maulana Fazlur Rehman had failed so far to extract any flexibility from Nisar on this issue.

Close to my finishing this piece, however, a reliable source has informed me that the opposition leader had finally been persuaded to consider a clause that qualifies the word ‘consultation’ with the addition of an adjective: “meaningful.”

If you go by the interpretation that the Supreme Court had furnished for the notion of “meaningful consultation,” Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan can expect a veto-like edge when it will come to negotiating for the appointment of a caretaker prime minister for holding the next elections. But we are still not sure regarding final draft of a desperately-sought amendment to validate the election of 28 legislators.

Whatever happens in the end, for now Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has certainly bought another day to keep the government waiting in the name of ‘need to inform and consult Nawaz Sharif on this.”

Published in The Express Tribune, February 9^th, 2012.