Two parallel parliamentary panels on legislative business sitting idle

ISLAMABAD: Two parallel parliamentary panels have been created by Speaker Asad Qaiser to enable consensus legislative business by the ruling coalition and the opposition parties to take place in parliament but both bodies have been lying dormant since their establishment.

The reason for their idleness is the lack of any initiative to make them sit together in the legislature and talk about any agreed law-making without any hassle or hurdles. The result is that no cooperation whatsoever exists between the government and the opposition to unanimously pass even those laws that are non-controversial and necessary for certain objectives.

The two forums – the parliamentary committee on legislative business (PCLB) and the parliamentary consultation committee on legislative business (PCCLB) – were formed by the Speaker after taking the two sides into confidence, leading to the nomination of their members by party heads.

“During my tenure as the Speaker, I used to invite the opposition and the government to discuss the legislative business to ensure its smooth sailing in parliament. Invariably, the two sides would show accommodation by accepting or rejecting certain clauses of the bills in question during discussions and inserting or dropping some amendments in them,” former Speaker and prominent Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Sardar Ayaz Sadiq said.

He said that if the present government takes the same course by having the opposition on board in legislative business, the tension, chaos and pandemonium being witnessed for the past three years, would not surface and the overall parliamentary atmosphere would remain congenial. The two sides are required to listen to and accept each other’s point of view on the proposed legislation, he suggested, and said that this way parliament would be able to do its actual job – lawmaking – and function properly.

Asad Qaiser set up the PCLB after the treasury benches, in a period of a mere two days last month, bulldozed 30 laws through the National Assembly without consultation or even providing a clue to the opposition about their content. After their approval, the government thought that given the environment in which these bills were cleared, they would be blocked by the estranged opposition parties in the Senate. Then, on the prodding of the government, the Speaker took the initiative, talked to the opposition and formed the PCLB to review all the 30 bills, which, most importantly, included multiple amendments in the Elections Act, 2017 that the opposition had rejected.

The panel headed by Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood is yet to hold its inaugural meeting and is still to frame its rules. As a result, none of the bills unilaterally passed in the National Assembly have been taken up by it. There are no indications that the forum is being convened soon.

The PCLB comprises 20 members with 11 belonging to the government (apart from the non-voting advisor on parliamentary affairs) and eight opposition lawmakers. It has representatives of the PML-N, Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Jamiat-e- Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F). Several federal ministers are part of the committee.

The PCCLB is an even larger body having 32 members. The ruling coalition and the independents supporting it have 17 lawmakers in it while the opposition parties have a tally of 15 legislators.

It is a more inclusive forum as it also has the representatives of the Pashtun Tahuffuz Movement, Awami National Party, Balochistan National Party-Mengal, National Party and Mutahidda Qaumi Movement apart from the major parliamentary players like the PML-N, PPP and JUI-F.

It seems that neither side is interested in summoning either of these two panels to reach a consensus on law-making. Apparently, both sides are giving importance to the impending deliberations in the Senate committee on parliamentary affairs where the amendments in the Elections Act have been referred for consideration.

However, the remaining 38 bills still remain unattended. They, according to the Speaker’s decision that he announced at the time of forming the PCLB, are supposed to be taken up by this committee. Most of these proposed laws deal with non-political issues and for this reason they have not attracted much attention of the opposition which may not be against their passage in the Senate once an agreement is arrived at on the amendments in the Elections Act.

The government had passed 21 bills in the National Assembly on June 10 amid the opposition’s protest and boycott. No debate whatsoever was held on them. Similarly, nine bills were approved on June 7.