D-day postponed to Friday?
Raza Rabbani was told to write the first draft of the 20th amendment.
After more than 90 minutes of irksome waiting, the National Assembly was finally forced to begin meeting Thursday evening with visibly vacant spaces in all corners of the house.
Instead of sitting in the press gallery, however, most reporters remained huddled in the lounge. They were all ears to their colleagues who had spent the day at the Supreme Court. Reporter after reporter would recall various remarks from the bench and tactics Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan had employed for ducking them. The narration often invoked loud laughter.
While in need of material for this column, I could not join the party. The thin attendance in the house clearly indicated that the government and the PML-N had yet to reach an agreed draft for amending the Constitution.
Ostensibly, another amendment in the Constitution is merely required to validate 28 members of various elected houses. The opposition had played hard to get, however, to bail the government out of a trivial-looking impasse.
Fully comprehending the government’s vulnerable spots, the opposition had rather been trying hard to get firm commitments, appropriately written in the Constitution, for ensuring the formation of an independent election commission. In the end, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan did not finish there.
Negotiating hard with the government, he gradually ended up sticking to the demand of having a caretaker prime minister as well that was to be appointed through consensus between the outgoing prime minister and the opposition leader in the National Assembly.
Despite being an acknowledged consensus-builder, Syed Khurshid Shah had been failing to persuade Nisar for some agreement in three consecutive rounds. In desperation, he had to seek the help of Raza Rabbani early this week.
Rabbani also roped in Maulana Fazlur Rehman for help. Yet both of them had not been proving of much help to Khurshid Shah. With collective and consistent efforts of the trio, Nisar finally began showing some flexibility somewhere late Wednesday evening, but only over the words to be used to meet his demands.
After giving an approving nod for possible framing of the proposed amendment, he left for his hometown late last evening and throughout Thursday remained busy there to arrange for the rites associated with observation of the first death anniversary of his mother.
Zahid Hamid has now been deputed by the PML-N to sit with Raza Rabbani to furnish words for the agreement that Khurshid Shah and Chaudhry Nisar had reached in broader terms.
In spite of injecting some flexibility in Chaudhry Nisar after dogged efforts, Syed Khurshid Shah could not win an approving pat from his leader. President Asif Ali Zardari was rather reported to have repeatedly thrown tantrums at the core committee meeting of his party at the Presidency Wednesday night. When briefed about the wordings of the possible amendment, he was once provoked to even ask tauntingly: “why don’t you beg Chaudhry Nisar to run the government as well?”
At least three reliable sources informed me Wednesday night that the president’s conduct at the core committee meeting had “virtually cancelled out the possibility of our government reaching an agreement on the opposition over the 20th Amendment.”
The coolheaded pragmatists from within the PPP did not give up, though. They had to consume many hours of pleading to make their leader realize that the Zardari-Gilani government must go an extra mile to get the 20th Amendment passed. Without providing the constitutional cover to 28 parliamentarians, the government might not be able to get elections for half the seats of the Senate held on schedule. “Someone can always go to the Supreme Court to get those elections postponed while taking the position that the vacant seats of the senate were being filled by getting votes from incomplete houses,” the President and some of his hawkish supporters were told.
These real or imagined apprehensions stirred about the fate of already scheduled elections for the vacant senate seats eventually softened hawks in the PPP-led coalition. Raza Rabbani was told to write the first draft of the 20th amendment. In his chambers, he had been sitting with Syed Khurshid Shah and Zahid Hamid until my leaving the parliament. There were clear signs that if not by late Thursday night, somewhere in the early hours of Friday, we would have the final draft of the proposed amendment.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 10th, 2012.
Instead of sitting in the press gallery, however, most reporters remained huddled in the lounge. They were all ears to their colleagues who had spent the day at the Supreme Court. Reporter after reporter would recall various remarks from the bench and tactics Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan had employed for ducking them. The narration often invoked loud laughter.
While in need of material for this column, I could not join the party. The thin attendance in the house clearly indicated that the government and the PML-N had yet to reach an agreed draft for amending the Constitution.
Ostensibly, another amendment in the Constitution is merely required to validate 28 members of various elected houses. The opposition had played hard to get, however, to bail the government out of a trivial-looking impasse.
Fully comprehending the government’s vulnerable spots, the opposition had rather been trying hard to get firm commitments, appropriately written in the Constitution, for ensuring the formation of an independent election commission. In the end, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan did not finish there.
Negotiating hard with the government, he gradually ended up sticking to the demand of having a caretaker prime minister as well that was to be appointed through consensus between the outgoing prime minister and the opposition leader in the National Assembly.
Despite being an acknowledged consensus-builder, Syed Khurshid Shah had been failing to persuade Nisar for some agreement in three consecutive rounds. In desperation, he had to seek the help of Raza Rabbani early this week.
Rabbani also roped in Maulana Fazlur Rehman for help. Yet both of them had not been proving of much help to Khurshid Shah. With collective and consistent efforts of the trio, Nisar finally began showing some flexibility somewhere late Wednesday evening, but only over the words to be used to meet his demands.
After giving an approving nod for possible framing of the proposed amendment, he left for his hometown late last evening and throughout Thursday remained busy there to arrange for the rites associated with observation of the first death anniversary of his mother.
Zahid Hamid has now been deputed by the PML-N to sit with Raza Rabbani to furnish words for the agreement that Khurshid Shah and Chaudhry Nisar had reached in broader terms.
In spite of injecting some flexibility in Chaudhry Nisar after dogged efforts, Syed Khurshid Shah could not win an approving pat from his leader. President Asif Ali Zardari was rather reported to have repeatedly thrown tantrums at the core committee meeting of his party at the Presidency Wednesday night. When briefed about the wordings of the possible amendment, he was once provoked to even ask tauntingly: “why don’t you beg Chaudhry Nisar to run the government as well?”
At least three reliable sources informed me Wednesday night that the president’s conduct at the core committee meeting had “virtually cancelled out the possibility of our government reaching an agreement on the opposition over the 20th Amendment.”
The coolheaded pragmatists from within the PPP did not give up, though. They had to consume many hours of pleading to make their leader realize that the Zardari-Gilani government must go an extra mile to get the 20th Amendment passed. Without providing the constitutional cover to 28 parliamentarians, the government might not be able to get elections for half the seats of the Senate held on schedule. “Someone can always go to the Supreme Court to get those elections postponed while taking the position that the vacant seats of the senate were being filled by getting votes from incomplete houses,” the President and some of his hawkish supporters were told.
These real or imagined apprehensions stirred about the fate of already scheduled elections for the vacant senate seats eventually softened hawks in the PPP-led coalition. Raza Rabbani was told to write the first draft of the 20th amendment. In his chambers, he had been sitting with Syed Khurshid Shah and Zahid Hamid until my leaving the parliament. There were clear signs that if not by late Thursday night, somewhere in the early hours of Friday, we would have the final draft of the proposed amendment.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 10th, 2012.