ISLAMABAD, Jan 29: The caretaker government will face unwanted questions in the Senate that meets on Wednesday evening to begin an opposition-called session, which is also likely to fuel political rivalries ahead of February 18 elections.

Interim Prime Minister Mohammedmian Soomro’s ministers will have to account for not only their own conduct during one and a half months they have been in office but also about their long-serving predecessors on burning issues ranging from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to the country’s worst food shortages.

The government had sought to avoid calling the 100-seat upper house session even at the cost of violating the Constitution, apparently to spare the loyalists of President Pervez Musharraf the embarrassment of being blamed for so many bad things happening all around so close to the elections from the only parliamentary platform available after the National Assembly and the four provincial assemblies ceased to exist at the expiration of their five-year terms on November 15.

But Senate acting chairman Mir Jan Mohammad Jamali, standing in for Mr Soomro had to bow to a requisition for the session the combined opposition filed on Thursday with a six-point agenda aimed at putting the government on the spot in the upper house while it is already besieged by what critics see as the worst turmoil of more than nine years of President Musharraf’s military-cum-civilian regime.

The session is due to begin at 4pm and parliamentary sources said it could be brief despite a long agenda because some of the senators from both sides are contesting the elections and in view of the expected increase in party campaigns after a predicted end of a prevailing cold wave this week and a 40-day mourning of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) for its leader’s assassination.

The agenda includes a reference or discussion on Ms Bhutto’s assassination, the law and order situation marked by a wave of suicide bombings and militants’ revolts in the northwest of the country, inflation and shortages of essential commodities like wheat flour, and the aftermath of the now-lifted extra-constitutional emergency, which President Musharraf imposed on November 3 in his capacity as army chief and which was used to sack about 60 judges of the superior courts, detain thousands of political and legal activists and put new restrictions on the media.

It also seeks passage of opposition-sponsored resolutions for disapproving the two ordinances enforced under the November 3 emergency to curtail the freedom of both the print and electronic media.

Opposition sources said the opposition parties would also seek discussion on some of about 25 adjournment motions filed by their members since the Senate held its last regular session in August.