ISLAMABAD, June 17: The opposition in the National Assembly continued on Thursday its criticism of the next fiscal budget, maintaining that the government had failed to control poverty
and increased the defence allocations by 21 per cent while giving no real relief to the downtrodden.
On a call attention notice, the house was told that the foreign minister was in the process of talks with the United States and some other countries to make visa and entry procedure reciprocal. But, the movers complained, the foreign ministry was not cooperating with the members of parliament in getting visas and their letters were being ignored by the embassies.
Taking part in the debate, Pakhtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party chief Mehmud Khan Achakzai lashed out at the frequent military interventions, and said resultantly, the 1973 Constitution had lost its validity making it necessary to evolve a new charter for the federation.
He said: "We have to decide once and for all that this country will no more be governed by the agencies and the armed forces and that the armed forces, the judiciary and the agencies will be subservient to the elected parliament."
He asked the armed forces to desist from waging a war against their own people in Wana and Karachi, otherwise, the growing hatred against these actions would boil over and destroy the very unity of the federation.
The impression prevalent in the smaller units about having been turned into colonies should be removed, he stressed. Mr Achakzai said the army and agencies were incapable of resolving the deepening crises in which this nation had been entrapped, and called for a roundtable conference of all politicians, including Ms Benazir Bhutto and Mr Nawaz Sharif.
Pakistan Muslim League MNA Ghulam Sarwar Khan accused the opposition parties of indulging in perpetual conspiracies to oust governments in power, thereby, making it convenient for the army takeover.
He frontally attacked the religious leadership of the country for misleading the countrymen in the name of Islam, and claimed that while the misguided people fought a jihad in Afghanistan the religious leadership made piles of dollars.
Shah Mehmud Qureshi of the People's Party Parliamentarians stressed the need for adopting a long-term strategy to steer the country out of its economic backwardness. He said the poverty rate had grown at an alarming rate of 43 per cent during the last few years, which the government had falsely claimed to have come down by 4.2 per cent.
Despite a welcome package for the agriculturists, he claimed that the country's agriculture was at the brink of a complete collapse with its growth dropping to a measly 2.6 per cent from 4.5 per cent of last year.
The foreign investment, he claimed, had dropped drastically while the foreign exchange had no impact on the country's overall economic growth. He claimed that the GDP growth target of eight per cent proposed for the medium term was not achievable as the present 6.4 per cent GDP was also not sustainable.
The food support programme which the government was very proud of having launched for poverty reduction, he alleged, did not exist in rural areas of the country which suffered from severe poverty.
He called for ending water shortage crisis, withdrawal of GST from agricultural implements and inputs and ending the crisis in agri-marketing for putting the agriculture on a sound footing and to achieve autarky.
