In what is an unusual development for a Sunday, both the National Assembly and Senate sessions are to convene today one after the other, with the highly anticipated but closely guarded ‘constitutional package’ expected to be on the agenda.
Both the sessions were scheduled for much earlier in the day but have been delayed multiple times as both the government and the opposition members remain busy holding important meetings.
It is unusual for parliament to convene on a weekend, as it usually only happens in budget sessions or sittings convened for a specific, time-sensitive issue.
The package aims to fix the tenure of the chief justice of Pakistan (CJP) at three years among other things.
Today’s NA session was initially slated for 11:30am but then changed to 4pm on a Special Parliamentary Committee’s request made to the NA speaker.
However, the session was unable to start even at the revised time as meetings between the govt and political parties continued. It remains unknown at what time the session would now begin.
Among the pre-session dialogues was Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s meeting with his elder sibling, Nawaz Sharif, and his son Hamza Shehbaz.
The PML-N leadership also met MQM-P leaders as well as Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, but more importantly, JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who again became a sought-after personality for the government as his party could hold the key in the bail sailing through the parliament.
