ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's Leader of the Opposition in the Senate Yusuf Raza Gilani resigned on Monday after backlash over his absence from the house, which allowed the government to narrowly manage to get a controversial bill passed from the opposition-dominated upper house.
Gilani, the 69-year-old Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leader, was among eight opposition senators who had skipped last Friday's Senate session during voting on the crucial State Bank of Pakistan (Amendment) Bill.
Opposition parties, of which the PPP is a part, enjoy a comfortable majority in the upper house but the government presented the bill on a day when eight opposition Senators were absent, which helped it pass the bill with a slim majority of one vote.
Gilani was criticised because due to his absence the vote was tied at 42 in support of the bill and an equal number of senators opposing. It created an opportunity for the Chairman Senate, Sadiq Sanjrani, to use his decisive vote in the favour of the government and the bill was passed. "I want to thank Gilani and the PPP (for support)," Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry had said after the bill was passed.
Leader of the House in the Senate, Wasim Shehzad, in his tongue-in-cheek style thanked Gilani in the house and quoted a verse that there should be a "reason if he (Gilani) was absent during voting". Gilani was sacked as prime minister in 2012 after his conviction by the Supreme Court for disobeying its orders and banned from politics for five years.
He returned to the house only last year and the criticism proved too much for him. "I am not astonished by the harsh words from my opponents, but I am astonished by the silence of my well-wishers," Gilani said in a speech in the Senate on Monday.
"If ministers would have said something, it would have been an honour for me. But some turncoats are saying that I helped the government and I am saying that (the government) won because of your votes," he said, apparently referring to Information Minister Chaudhry who was part of the PPP when Gilani was the prime minister.
During the speech, he also lashed out at the Chairman for using his vote and ended his address by announcing his resignation as the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate. Gilani said that he had already sent his resignation to his party to announce his replacement.
The bill passed was a key condition of the International Monetary Fund to consider the release of USD 1 billion out of a USD 6 billion bailout package.