Opposition names Hasil Bizenjo for Senate chairmanship

LAHORE: Nine political parties of the opposition-led Rahbar Committee have named Mir Hasil Khan Bizenjo as the joint candidate for the post of Senate chairman, Geo News reported.

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supremo Nawaz Sharif approved the name of National Party’s Hasil Bizenjo as the opposition’s joint candidate for the post. Sources told Geo News Sharif had suggested Bizenjo’s name in order to curry favour for Balochistan. Bizenjo had earlier served as former federal minister for ports and shipping.

This comes after the opposition submitted a resolution of no-confidence against Senate Chairman Sadiq Sanjrani to the Senate Secretariat. The 11-member opposition’s anti-government Rahbar Committee had announced that had achieved consensus to remove the Senate chairman.

Reacting to the development, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Information and Broadcasting Firdous Ashiq Awan on Thursday termed the bid a “political adventure” which would be foiled by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and its allies.

Talking to reporters in Islamabad, she said the country “cannot afford such adventures due to its political and economic situation”. The opposition, she said, has opted for the same tactics to create hurdles in the passage of the national budget, but failed due to the government’s prudent policies.

“They will meet the same fate and not to succeed in removing the Senate chairman,” she said. Awan said the incumbent chairman has neither violated the Constitution nor deviated from the Senate’s code of conduct.

He is only “being targeted” for not following the dictations of so-called “political pundits”. “The Senate being the Upper House of Parliament is the symbol of the federation but the opposition does not desire it to function smoothly and independently,” she added.

She said independent members of the Senate would support institutional supremacy and vote for strengthening them. The independent members were playing a pivotal role in national progress, she added.

Awan said the PTI and its allied parties would stand by the institutions instead of personalities as they believed in institutional supremacy. She said it was Prime Minister Imran Khan who had challenged the status quo in the country and had been working on institutional reforms from the very first day after assuming power.

The state institutions, she said, were considered supreme in civilised democracies, but the former rulers had made every attempt to weaken them in order to make them subservient to their will. “The 12th man of politics, who is not a part of the National Assembly, wants to run Parliament on his whims that is highly condemnable,” she remarked.

Firdous said Maryam Nawaz was making all-out efforts to mislead the public by using unethical tactics. The forensic test of the judge’s video should be conducted at the earliest as tampering a video was itself a crime, she added.