From theatre in Karachi to numbers in Senate

The upper house of parliament is slated to get 54 new members, giving the PPP an opportunity to significantly increase its present tally of 27 seats and perhaps even grab a majority in what will be a 104-member Senate from next year

WHILE the political theatre in Sindh and verbal sparring between the PPP and PML-N supremos are grabbing the headlines, behind the political scenes attention is quietly turning towards the battle for the Senate in March.

The upper house of parliament is slated to get 54 new members (re-election to 50 general, technocrat/ulema and women seats and four new, post-18th Amendment minority seats), giving the PPP an opportunity to significantly increase its present tally of 27 seats and perhaps even grab a majority in what will be a 104-member Senate from next year.

But the possibility is generating speculation that the PPP’s otherwise inexorable march towards a dominant position in Senate may be scuttled somehow.

Could the PML-N, with only a handful of Senate seats from Punjab at present, delay the Senate election and force early general election so that new provincial and national assemblies, more favourable towards the N-League, elect the next Senate cohort?Will the security establishment, ever wary of politicians consolidating power, countenance one half of parliament dominated by the PPP, perhaps the first step towards a kind of one-party state as its rivals flounder? Are the internecine warfare and ferocious mud-slinging in Karachi part of surreptitious efforts to forestall Senate elections?

What is clear is that part of the reason for the speculation building around the Senate elections is the upper chamber’s chequered history. “This is the first time since the ’70s, other than military dispensations, that the same assemblies will elect both halves of the Senate,” remarked Nayyar Hussain Bukhari, the PPP senator who is Leader of the House.

Mr Bukhari noted that the first Benazir Bhutto government was felled before Senate elections could take place, while her second government was only able to preside over Senate elections in 1994 before being ousted in 1996.

Perhaps the most notorious example of intervention ahead of a Senate election came during Nawaz Sharif’s second, ‘heavy mandate’ term. With the capture of the Senate only months away (the election was scheduled for March 2000) Sharif was on the threshold of forcing through controversial religiously hued legislative and constitutional changes when the Musharraf coup in late 1999 wrapped up the entire elected set-up.

PPP: game, set … match?

Now, what is at stake next March are institutional and psychological advantages for the PPP.

“Understandably, our political opponents would not like to see the PPP increase its strength in the Senate to cripple our ability to legislate,”

One Province Leads To Many

By Asha'ar Rehman: Dawn Op-ed August 9, 2011

THE wish has been expressed, the slogans raised. The people have set off on the road to a new province, which will take some travelling and entail quite a lot of discomfort, not to speak of the pain of those who must view this as a parting.

All historical tours of Pakistan must begin in India. Indian examples abound in all our discussions. It is no surprise then that the new province debate is in part sustained by how the Indians divided their provinces. They divided them in the wake of Partition, chastened by Partition. It was in a way logical for the people of India to demarcate the boundaries when a partition had just happened.

The movements for division — or as it were, a coming together of small British-period states — on a linguistic basis was strong even in the early 1950s, and following the creation of a Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh just six years after Partition, a number of new states emerged on the Indian map in 1956. The principles set and constitutional cover given, it later led to the creation of more states. Pakistan, meanwhile, decided to go its own way in nation-building.

Religion was a given, and it used Urdu, in the name of unity of the people who lived in its five provinces. East Pakistan was told by none other than the Quaid himself that Urdu