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Opposition bills retrieved from oblivion

By Nazmul Ashraf
While the government is blaming the opposition for not attending parliament session to support its planned bill for retention of the resened seats for women, there were foolhardy attempts in the House yesterday to introduce two long-pending Opposition-sponsored bills on the issue.
Similar attempts were also made for two other private members' bills amid continued absence of the Opposition lawmakers belonging to BNP and its allies.
It took the Parliament Secretariat several years to push the bills to the House while the Rules of Procedure provides that a private member desiring to introduce a bill will give the Secretary 15 days' written notice of his intention to do so. along with three copies of the bill.
But the Rules do not mention any time frame for deciding the fate of such a bill.
The attempts to introduce the four bills failed as none of their architects was present in the House.
Three opposition MPs. one from BNP and two from Jatiya Party, deposited the bills seek-
Ing various amendments to the Constitution during 1**07-1999 when the opposition lawmakers used to attend session. The BNP-led opposition started their boycott in July last year.
Abdul Mannan of BNP and Rabeya Bhuiyan of JP submitted the two bills on reserved seats for women. Mannan also submitted another bill about the mode of election of the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker while the bill of Dr Rustam All Farazi of JP is about double membership of parliament.
Mannan was absent as his party is now on a long boycott of parliament session while Rabeya Bhuiyan is now abroad The reason for Farazi’s absence could not be known. Bhuiyan and Farazi now belong to the breakaway faction of JP that is attending parliament session.
The parliament secretariat did not supply the press any copy of the bills, understandably for certain absence of the members concerned.
As the four private members' bills were included in yesterday's order of the day. Speaker Humayun Rasheed Chowdhury’ invited all the four opposition MPs to seek permission to table
their bills. Finding them absent, the Speaker announced that the bills were not placed.
A government-sponsored bill seeking extension of the tenure of 30 reserved seats for women by another 10 years Is likely to be placed in parliament during the current session.
The tenure of the seats is due to expire on April 4. 2001 if not extended by the present parliament or the next parliament is elected before the expiry.
The JS Business Advisory Committee at a meeting on the day before the current session began Tuesday decided to drop question-answer session on the private members' day to give more emphasis on businesses of the non-minister MPs.
Accordingly, yesterdays agenda dropped the question-hour and contained four bills of the private members.
Also on the agenda were five resolutions from the private members, three of which were resolved. But two of the resolutions could not be entertained due to absence of the relevant ministers. Another was dropped due to absence of the MP concerned.