ISLAMABAD: Abrupt adjournments continue to rule the roost at the upper house of the parliament as the Chairman Senate Sadiq Sanjrani, again, failed to put the house in order and ended the session, minutes after it started, without issuing the production order of Senator Azam Swati on Thursday.
Started at 3 pm, the sitting continued for hardly 10 minutes — ending at 3:10 pm — without transacting most of the routine business agenda.
Still, Minister of State for Law and Justice Shahadat Awan managed to lay a copy of the Tax Laws Second Amendment Bill, 2022 in the house.
Headed by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Dr Shahzad Waseem, the opposition senators chanted slogans against the government and in favour of Swati.
“Mr chairman! wake up and play your constitutional role in securing Swati’s release,” the charged senators asked the Senate chief who kept asking the lawmakers to settle down in their seats.
Undeterred, the lawmakers went ahead with their protest and encircled Sanjrani’s dais. A visibly perturbed Senate chief then called the Senate’s security staff to bring the situation under control but the senators refused to budge.
Like the ongoing 322nd Senate session, the house’s previous 321st session also ended in protests in October this year as the Senate chief kept on adjourning the related sittings without issuing Swati’s production order.
Swati, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) senator, was first arrested in October, released later, and then again arrested in November by the Cybercrime Wing of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) for “defamatory” tweets and statements against the then army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa and other senior military men.
After he was arrested for the first time,
Swati was released on bail by a district and sessions court. After his release, the 74-year-old senator alleged that he was subjected to extreme humiliation during his detention including having been stripped naked and severely tortured by the officials of a premier intelligence agency at the behest of two senior military men. The PTI senator as well as Chairman PTI Imran Khan has repeatedly named these two officials in their pressers and public addresses, demanding action against them.
In the course of his current detention, Swati was kept in Adiala Jail Rawalpindi before being moved to Balochistan and then to Sindh. Dozens of cases were registered against him.
Rule 84 of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in the Senate 2012 provides that the chairman Senate or chairman of a Senate committee may summon a senator in custody on the charge of any offence or under any law relating to preventive detention to attend a sitting or sittings of the Senate or meeting of a committee of which he/she is a member, if the chair considers their presence necessary.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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