The government’s claims of believing in the supremacy of parliament for resolving national issues can be gauged by the fact that despite a lapse of around 10 days, NA Speaker Dr Fehmida Mirza has failed to form a parliamentary committee over the violence in Karachi.
More interestingly, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has also failed to nominate its members for the committee, although Interior Minister Rehman Malik had endorsed the proposal for the formation of the committee, suggesting the committee visit Karachi and remain there until normalcy returned to the troubled port city.
On August 12, the National Assembly (NA) had adopted a unanimous motion to form an all-parties’ parliamentary committee to find out the reasons behind the violence in Karachi and Balochistan and to suggest durable and sustainable solutions.
The committee, which is yet to be notified by the speaker, had to submit its report in two months.
Parliamentary sources told Pakistan Today that opposition parties, including the PML-N, the MQM and the JUI-F had proposed nominees to the NA speaker, while the parties from the treasury benches, the PPP, PML-Q, ANP and the PML-Functional, had yet not forwarded their nominations for the proposed committee.
The PML-N nominated Sardar Mehtab Abbasi, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Zahid Hamid, Khwaja Asif and Rana Tanveer, while the MQM proposed the names of Haider Abbas Rizvi, Wasim Akhtar, Asif Hasnain and Sajid Ahmed.
Talking to Pakistan Today, Aftab Sheikh, chief PML-N whip in the National Assembly and the mover of the motion for formation of a parliamentary committee on Karachi, said the PML-N had forwarded its nominations to the speaker the very same day the motion was unanimously adopted by the Lower House.
The JUI-F had nominated Maulana Attaur Rehman.
An official of the National Assembly said the delay in nominating members for the parliamentary committee by the PPP and other ruling parties was the main obstacle in way of committee’s formal constitution by the NA speaker.
“Once all parties send their nominations to the speaker, she will decide on the strength of the committee. It can be a large committee having 15-20 members and its size might be kept small, but it will have representation from all parliamentary parties,” he added.
The PPP-led coalition government has developed a history of not implementing parliamentary resolutions since 2008, when the joint sitting of parliament passed a consensus resolution calling for an end to drone attacks inside the country’s territorial boundaries and revisiting the country’s foreign policy and its association with the war on terror.
PML-N’s Khurram Dastgir Khan said the government’s failure to constitute a parliamentary committee on the Karachi bloodshed was PPP’s defiance to parliament’s decisions.
“The government’s lack of will in implementing unanimous motion passed by parliament indicates that the government does not want to solve the Karachi issue,” he said.
Khan said the motion had been adopted after a ten-day debate on the matter, but the government did not constitute the committee as it was itself involved in the Karachi carnage.
“We condemn the government’s defiance to parliament’s decision and the prime minister’s hollow slogans for the supremacy of parliament,” he added.