Staff correspondent
Relations between the Awami League-led treasury bench and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led main opposition were strained over seating arrangement soon after the new parliament went into its maiden session on January 25.
The session has become a dull and dreary affair as lawmakers of the BNP and its allies continued staying off the parliament session as the speaker, Abdul Hamid, kept pending a decision on their demand to return their front row seats. Lawmakers of the main opposition did not return to the session on Sunday. The crisis is taking new twists with new problems cropping up and the opposition MPs bringing fresh allegation that the majority party has started making decisions unilaterally.
‘We are abstaining from joining the parliament session as the speaker is yet to say anything about our demand to return our front row seats to his left in the house,’ senior BNP lawmaker Salauddin Quader Chowdhury told reporters after a meeting of the lawmakers of the four-party alliance Sunday evening. ‘We are waiting for his decision’.
The opposition lawmakers did not return to the House after staging a walkout from parliament on January 28 in protest at the new seating arrangement giving eight instead of 21 seats in the first two rows to the left of the speaker to them. Parliament so far held four sittings on January 25, 28, 29 and February 1.
When asked whether they would join the session if the speaker did not change the seating arrangement, Chowdhury said they were coming to the Jatiya Sangsad complex everyday eager to join the session. ‘But how can we return to the session if they [treasury bench] continue to play tricks and take decisions which are supposed to be made by us?’
The opposition MPs said they were ready to discuss the problem ‘with the speaker’ if he invited them.
BNP vice chairman MK Anwar MP alleged that the treasury bench was trying to create a situation by making unilateral and controversial decisions to keep the opposition lawmakers out of the parliament.
‘The majority party has started taking decisions that are supposed to be made by the opposition,’ Anwar, a bureaucrat-turned-politician, said.
At a request of the ruling party chief whip, the opposition chief whip, in consultation with the leader of the opposition, sent two names to represent the opposition in the special committee on parliamentary activities. But they [ruling party] unilaterally excluded one, out of the two, and replaced him with another opposition MP without taking his consent,’ he said, adding, ‘It is unusual in parliamentary practice.’ Moreover, the speaker did not include a representative from the opposition in the five-member panel of chairmen to conduct sittings in absence of the speaker and deputy speaker.
Opposition chief whip Jainal Abedin Faruk said he had sent the names of Salauddin Quader Chowdhury and MK Anwar, at the instruction of the leader of the opposition, to the ruling party chief whip. ‘But they [ruling party] dropped Salauddin Quader Chowdhury and included me in the list without my consent,’ he said.
The speaker changed the seating arrangement laid out by his predecessor Jamiruddin Sircar who had given the main opposition lawmakers nine seats in the front row and 12 in the second row ignoring the treasury bench proposal.
An opposition delegation had a meeting with the speaker on January 29 on the matter and demanded three seats in addition to the allocated four seats in the front row. They asked the speaker to inform them about his decision by Sunday.
In the 2001 parliament, when BNP was in power, all 10 seats – eight from Awami League and two from Jatiya Party factions – in the front row to the left of the speaker were allocated to opposition lawmakers.
When the speaker, Abdul Hamid, was asked whether he would invite the main opposition to talks to resolve the dispute over seat arrangement, he said, ‘I have continued my efforts to get them back to the house. But the sides must make some concessions to resolve the issue.’
‘It is not the last session. It is just the beginning,’ he said.
When asked about BNP’s allegation that its list of representatives for the special committee had been changed unilaterally by the ruling party, the speaker said, ‘the [opposition] chip whip should be a member of the committee.’
Courtesy: newagebd.com
