The President and Parliament

The swearing-in ceremony of the federal cabinet on Monday was as grim as it forebode troubled times ahead for the relationship between President Pervez Musharraf and the four-party coalition government headed by Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani.
According to media reports, the ceremony lasted barely seven minutes during which there was hardly an exchange of words, much less pleasantries, between the two sides.
While nine of the PML (N) ministers wore black armbands protesting over Pervez Musharraf's legitimacy to give them the oath, none of the others too stayed back to enjoy a cup of tea at the Presidency.
The party heads, opposition leaders, diplomatic corps, and services chiefs - none of them was there at the swearing-in. Of the 24 ministers who took the oath of office at least a dozen were those who had suffered various lengths of incarceration at the hands of the Musharraf regime, but none had been convicted. Last week Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani had taken oath as Prime Minister from the same tormentor.
The whole saga was so much weird. But, the drama does not end there: in the next week or so "dozens" of more ministers will have to be sworn in by President Musharraf, out of which at least eight are expected to be from the PML (N). If that snubbing of the President at the swearing-in ceremony was not bad enough, the ministers in their remarks to the media waiting outside the Presidency, made no bones about how they would 'handle' Pervez Musharraf in the coming days and months.
The same evening at its maiden meeting, the federal cabinet went a step further and announced formation of a committee that would prepare recommendations for the procedure to be followed for reinstatement of judges. The sacked judges include deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry who earned his sack for daring to challenge the legality of President Musharraf's candidacy for reelection.
As things seem to be evolving, there is hardly the possibility of a smooth working relationship between President Musharraf and the new Parliament. Under the Constitution he is part of the Parliament but he could not address the joint session of the previous parliament, in violation of the constitutional mandatory provision.
Will he able to do so now that a far more hostile Parliament has come into being? Then there are the host of other constitutional situations that demand close rapport between these two pillars of state. The President is, of course, amenable to compromising with the emerging reality and of late he has promised to work with any government that people bring into power.
But the new government remains indifferent to his gestures. Since this is a coalition of the equals, each coalition partner weighing in with the government with its own perspective, the President's nemesis, the Nawaz Sharif-led PML (N), would tend to significantly affect the President-Parliament relationship.
Equally strong disincentive to smooth working between them is the devil in detail of how the Rules of Business would impact on that relationship. Rules of Business were formulated during the Presidency of the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but when he became prime minister in August 1973 under the new Constitution the orientation of these rules did not undergo the required reorientation to suit the needs of Parliamentary form of government.
That anomaly still obtains with ministries calling the shots instead of ministers. The same applies to the working in the provinces. That makes officials more powerful than the elected representatives at various tiers of government.
Likewise, the autonomy that should be granted to the regulatory bodies is not presently available to them, thus conditioning their decision-making to extraneous levers of power. Unless these and many more like these distortions are taken care of by the new government the power of the Parliament vis-à-vis the President would remain hamstrung and ineffectual.
Once this overlapping of powers and confusion about the application of Rules of Business are taken care of, the President-Parliament relationship would acquire some semblance of normality - even if some individuals get replaced.