Landmarks await NA’s first session

Published May 29, 2013
A view of the National Assembly. — File photo
A view of the National Assembly. — File photo

ISLAMABAD, May 28: As he still seemed reeling from his party’s rout in the May 11 elections, President Asif Ali Zardari summoned on Tuesday the new National Assembly for June 1 to begin a parliament process to install victors.

Quite some landmarks are on the cards in the process, culminating next week in Mian Nawaz Sharif, president of the victorious Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), taking over as prime minister in continuation of an historic, democratic transition in the country’s chequered life, about half of it under military rule.

The Saturday sitting, called as advised by caretaker Prime Minister Mir Hazar Khan Khoso and due to begin at 10am with oath-taking by the newly elected lawmakers, will mark the beginning of a five-year term of the new 342-seat house, succeeding one that completed its full term for the first time in the country under a civilian set-up despite a split mandate.

This time, the PML-N will have a comfortable majority of its own to be able to govern — though power-sharing deals have been made with some smaller parties — unlike its predecessor, President Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), that lacked those numbers and depended on often-unpredictable coalition partners.

No schedule for the remainder of the session has been formally announced by the National Assembly secretariat except that the oath to new lawmakers will be administered by the previous assembly’s speaker, Fehmida Mirza of the PPP, who, as required by law, retained her office even after the house stood dissolved on March 16 at the end of its term.

But according to a time-frame divulged to journalists by the caretaker government’s information minister, Arif Nizami, on Monday, the house will elect its new speaker and deputy speaker on June 3 and prime minister on June 5, when the term of the caretaker government comes to an end.

Mr Sharif, nominated by his party to be prime minister for the third time in about 22 years and with his election being a foregone conclusion because of the PML-N numbers in the house, will be the first Pakistani to take that job for as many times.

Former PPP leader Benazir Bhutto was denied the potential of that distinction by her Dec 27, 2007, assassination in Rawalpindi in the midst of an election campaign, and when the PPP emerged the single largest in the previous National Assembly in a delayed February 2008 vote, Mr Zardari, as co-chairman and effective party leader, handpicked Yousaf Raza Gilani to take the office that would have gone to her wife if she were alive.

Despite the historic nature of such a smooth transfer of power never seen before in more than 65 years of Pakistan’s life -- 33 under four military rulers -- the capital has missed the kind of drama it saw after the 2008 vote. Then Mr Zardari, much before his election as president, held court for weeks at his private Islamabad residence for the prime ministerial choice and coalition arrangements with the PML-N, which, as the second largest party in the house, stayed in Mr Gilani’s cabinet for months while the PPP remained part of the PML-N’s Punjab provincial government for three years.

This time, no such back-stage activity was seen in Islamabad until now. Mr Sharif has been planning his moves from his luxurious house at Raiwind, near Lahore, to the exclusion of the PPP, which has been routed in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, though retaining its dominance of Sindh and likely to have the consolation of getting the office of leader of opposition in the National Assembly as the second largest party there.

Also, Imran Khan, whose Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, whose stunning performance gave it second highest popular vote nationally and the third place in the National Assembly, remained confined first to hospital and then to his home in Lahore while convalescing from serious injuries suffered in a fall at a campaign rally, but guiding from there his party’s plans on matters like leading a coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, put up a token challenge in prime minister’s election and pursuing complaints of election rigging, particularly in Lahore.

Similarly, just before the election victors arrive in Islamabad, a shocked president Zardari chose to go to his Karachi residence rather than be at the presidency here, to ponder what went wrong for his party in the election -- besides the public anger against power shortages, high prices and militant threats of violence against liberal parties -- and why most voters disregarded his and previous government’s historic role in restoring a genuine parliamentary system, giving more autonomy to provinces and curtailing arbitrary presidential powers.

But he will have to be in Islamabad to administer oath of office to a new prime minister, who is to be the man he taunted in a famous June 21, 2011, speech at Naudero with a remark, “learn politics from us”, as he assailed Mr Sharif for allegedly following of Gen Ziaul Haq, of whom the PML-N leader had once been a protégé.

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