ISLAMABAD: The whole parliament seemed going adrift as a week-long row dividing the Senate over a controversial ministerial reply to a question hit the National Assembly on Wednesday with charges of egoism flying around in the absence of any political concession.

Only a day after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government and opposition parties seemed close to a new consensus on reviving a disrupted peace process with Taliban insurgents, a debate over the issue in the National Assembly was overtaken by the dispute in the Senate just as the majority in the 104-seat upper house held a rival sitting outside the parliament building.

The minority comprising the treasury benches and a dissident opposition party could hold only a brief regular sitting inside the chamber.

The third day of the National Assembly’s debate on the situation arising from last Friday’s killing of Taliban commander Hakeemullah Mehsud was interrupted when opposition leader Khursheed Ahmed Shah rose to point to a disquieting development happening in the Senate when “Pakistan is facing a crisis” and demanded that either Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan withdraw his allegedly wrong reply to a senator’s question rather than make it an issue of ego or the prime minister intervene personally to settle the matter.After the interior minister, who counter-charged the opposition of making it a matter of ego, refused to withdraw his reply, arguing that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government had rechecked the figures of casualties from terrorist attacks from June onwards and found them correct, and there being no sign of a prime ministerial intervention, Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq ended the discussion by referring the issue to a senior house member, Mehmood Khan Achakzai, head of the Balochistan-based and government-allied Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, for what he called “out-of-court settlement”.It remained unclear if the two sides had agreed to this arbitration, as Chaudhry Nisar slipped out of the house just as the speaker, who belongs to the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), was announcing his decision and Mr Shah kept silent on the matter.

Earlier, Mr Shah seemed to have faced some embarrassment from opposition partners when Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) vice-chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi, whose party has no presence in the Senate, and Muttahida Qaumi Movement parliamentary leader Farooq Sattar, whose party has not joined the opposition boycott of the Senate, described Mr Nisar’s explanation reasonable and suggested an end of the boycott.

But the opposition leader seemed to have won a point when he disputed, without any further challenge, the interior minister’s claim that never in Pakistan’s parliamentary history an answer to a question was withdrawn and said he himself had withdrawn some disputed answers related to the commerce ministry during the previous PPP-led coalition government

Soon, another row erupted as the main opposition parties, which remained divided over the opposition boycott in the Senate, united against the government move to bring, at the fag end of the day, a supplementary agenda to meet a constitutional requirement of laying before the house a recently issued controversial presidential ordinance that increased the period of preventive detention for terrorism suspects to 90 days from 30 days and gives police powers to paramilitary Rangers.

A threat of a protest walkout by the opposition forced Science and Technology Minister Zahid Hamid, who continues to oversee the government’s legislative affairs in parliament even after the law ministry’s portfolio was withdrawn from him in June, to put off the laying of the Protection of Pakistan Ordinance, 2013 – seen by rights activists as a draconian decree issued last month -- as well as a generally acceptable Anti-Terrorism (Amendment) Ordinance, 2013, which gives Rangers powers to shoot terror suspects after a verbal warning, besides providing for courts to accept electronically monitored messages as evidence in terror trials.

CAUTION AND FURY: Earlier in the sitting, the house suspended its question hour and other agenda business so it could continue the debate on the US drone strike for the third day, which was marked by calls for both caution and hard line in dealing with the United States and some rival claims about whether Hakeemullah Mehsud, who was Pakistan’s most wanted fugitive blamed for the murder of thousands of civilians and military personnel in terrorist attacks, could be called a “martyr” just because he was killed by a US strike.

Mr Achakzai, in a lengthy but most keenly heard speech of the day, counselled lawmakers against allowing sentiments to overwhelm politics and prescribed what he called a surely workable formula to end violence emanating from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata): accept Afghanistan as a sovereign state, disarm “private armies” of foreign nationals in Fata, and give Fata to its people like making the regions a separate province.

He had some ridicule reserved for two party leaders: about Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-F (JUI-F) Maulana Fazlur Rehman for a controversial remark to reporters on Tuesday that “even a dog killed by America is a martyr”, saying that this would entitle all people killed by American forces around the world to martyrdom and a place in paradise, and about PTI chief Imran Khan (for his threat to block Nato supplies passing through the PTI-ruled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province) after Nov 20, saying that he had advised the former cricket hero “not to hit a six in every matter”.

Another hard-line PTI lawmaker, Ms Shirin Mazari, even called for shooting down the US drones intruding into the Pakistani territory and “replying war with war”.

However, veteran parliamentarian and PTI president Makhdoom Javed Hashmi sounded somewhat moderate, saying the issue was not just of drone attacks but of the whole nation’s responsibility to defend Pakistan from such attacks and threatening somewhat rhetorically: “We will ‘gherao’ Americans for (safeguarding) our interests.”

While senior PML-N lawmakers avoided speaking on the matter, a party back-bencher, Rana Afzal, said that while Pakistan should negotiate with the United States to stop drone attacks, a “killer” like Mehsud should have been targeted by a Pakistan Air Force jet rather than being called a martyr.

Ms Shahida Rehmani, a back-bencher from the main opposition Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), said it was shameful that some parliamentarians from religious parties “called the murderer of thousands of people a shaheed”.

But two members of religious parties from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were undeterred by such denunciations with Maulana Mohammad Gohar Shah of JUI-F described Hakeemullah Mehsud’s death as “shahadat”. He called for a stoppage of Nato supplies passing through Pakistan. Sahibzada Tariqullah of Jamaat-i-Islami, echoing the JUI-F chief, said: “Whoever is killed by America is a shaheed.”

Awami National Party’s Ghulam Ahmed Bilour, who was the railways minister in the previous government and whose brother and senior Khyber Pakhtunkhawa minister Bashir Ahmed Bilour was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Peshawar early this year, made a passionate plea for peace talks with the Taliban so as to put an end to what he called “genocide of Pakhtuns” before the house was adjourned until 10.30 on Thursday.