ISLAMABAD: As the country awaits a parliamentary constitutional reforms committee, a veteran law-maker of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party pleaded in the National Assembly on Friday for having only a titular president who should also not head a political party.
Presidential powers is a key issue that must be resolved through constitutional amendments to be proposed by an all-parties committee of parliament, and the call by Syed Zafar Ali Shah came as the first public expression of the kind that appeared a taboo in recent months after President Asif Ali Zardari was elected to the office with all the powers assumed by his military predecessor General Pervez Musharraf while also leading the ruling party as its co-chairman.
‘The prime minister should be prime minister (with powers) and the president be a titular head of state as is in India,’ the PPP member from Sindh province said while speaking in a debate on President Zadari’s March 28 address to a joint sitting of the National Assembly and Senate.
He said although there was no express ban in the constitution, the spirit of the constitution’s article 41, which says the president ‘shall be the head of state and shall represent the unity of the republic’, was that that a president should not head a party.
National Assembly Speaker Fehmida Mirza is yet to name the all-parties committee she was authorised by the house on April 10 to form to propose amendments to the constitution and other laws to implement the famous Charter of Democracy signed in 2006 by assassinated PPP leader Benazir Bhutto and Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) leader Nawaz Sharif and later supported by most political parties in parliament.
The Charter calls for a return to a titular presidency by clipping its arbitrarily assumed powers to dissolve the National Assembly and appoint armed forces’ chiefs, provincial governors and the Chief Election Commissioner and give them back to the prime minister as was the position in the constitution before General Musharraf seized power in an Oct 12, 1999 coup.
Friday’s poorly attended National Assembly sitting saw some members expressing their reservations about the early outcome of the enforcement of a controversial Sharia regulation in the Malakand division of the North West Frontier Province, although all parties except the boycotting Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) had voted for an April 13 resolution that asked the president to approve the order to implement a peace deal with the militants of Swat valley.
Former interior minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, speaking on a point of order, said that even after the peace deal, Swat militants seemed to be involved in a suicide bomb attack in his constituency in the NWFP’s Charsadda district on Wednesday that killed 16 people because an injured alleged bomber had been traced to Swat district’s Charbagh area.
He asked the government to seek an explanation from Tehrik Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi chief Sufi Mohammad who made the deal with the government on behalf of the militants.
‘On the one hand there is peace agreement and on the other there this process (of violence) begun again,’ he said about the deal, which has been supported by most political parties but is seen by many in the civil society as an acquiescence to the power of the gun that would embolden the militants.
Before that, PPP’s Zafar Ali Shah opposed the peace deal’s provision for a gradual withdrawal of troops from Swat and said that even if peace was restored there, ‘we expect the army to play its role’.
ANP member Syed Haider Ali Shah, whose party leads the NWFP coalition government that made the peace deal with the militants, regretted MQM’s opposition to the move, which he said was necessary to restore peace in the province that had been ‘in a state of war’ for 30 years after it became the base for a Western-backed guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Independent member from Balochistan Mohammad Usman Advocate was most critical of the government’s handling of the situation in his troubled province, particularly vis-a-vis the issue of ‘missing persons’ allegedly picked up by intelligence agencies and the recent murder of three Baloch nationalist politicians after they were abducted from the office of a lawyer in Turbat town.
‘Don’t push the Baloch like Bengalis,’ he warned the government and called for halting what he called continuing military operation in Balochistan, registering a first information report for the murder of three Baloch laders, starting dialogue with ‘the real political forces’ of the province and recognising the Baloch people’s right over their natural resources.
PPP chief whip and Labour and Manpower Minister Khurshid Ahmed Shah assured the house that the federal government would seek a report from the PPP-led Balochistan provincial government about people who went missing during years of the previous military-led Musharraf government.
The house was later adjourned until 4pm on Monday.
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