ISLAMABAD, Feb 15: An uproar broke out in the Senate on Tuesday over the use of the controversial name of "Pakhtunkhawa" for the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) before the upper house was prorogued after a two-week session.
Leader of the house Wasim Sajjad and Senate deputy chairman Khalilur Rehman raised strong objections after Awami National Party (ANP) senator Ilyas Ahmad Bilour repeatedly described the NWFP as "Pakhtunkhawa" while complaining about a recent suspension of gas supply to industrial units in his home province.
"About what province they are talking?", Mr Sajjad asked and said "there is no such province (as Pakhtunkhawa)" in Pakistan as he spoke on behalf of the government following complaints by Mr Bilour and Senator Farhatullah Babar of the People's Party Parliamentarians (PPP) about the alleged gas supply suspension for 45 days.
The remarks from the treasury benches sparked noisy protests from Mr Bilour and Raza Mohammad Raza of the Pakhtunkhawa Milli Awami Party (PKMAP), who kept on shouting during Mr Sajjad's brief speech and until the deputy chairman read out President Pervez Musharraf's order proroguing the session amid more opposition protests.
"You are bulldozing (the house)," shouted PPP's Mohammad Enver Baig as several opposition senators rose in their seats protesting at what they called an unsatisfactory government response to the call-attention notice, whose authors also included opposition leader Raza Rabbani, PML-N senator and former NWFP chief Minister Sardar Mahtab Ahmed and ANP leader Asfandyar Wali.
Both ANP and PKMAP want the NWFP to be renamed as Pakhtunkhawa and call its present name as only a geographical description (coined by British rulers of the sub-continent) that they say is no longer valid even in geographical terms.
"Suba Sarhad is also my province (and) it is an insult to me if its name is changed (like this)," protested Mr Sajjad, who originally hails from the NWFP but has been elected to the present Senate from the Islamabad federal area. "This is not Pakhtunkhawa." "I agree with you," said deputy chairman Khalilur Rehman, who also belongs to the NWFP and was elected to the Senate from there.
Both Mr Bilour and Mr Babar, who spoke on the call-attention notice, called the prolonged gas supply suspension to industrial units in the Gadoon Amazai industrial estate as unjust to their province and called for laying a special pipeline to supply gas to the NWFP from the newly discovered Gurguri reserves in the province.
Mr Sajjad called the gas outage as a matter of concern but said this happened because there were not enough supplies at the time. Earlier, both Mr Sajjad and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Khusro Bakhtiar denied a British newspaper report that Pakistan had conceded that Dr A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, had passed on nuclear secrets and equipment to Iran.
Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal's Prof Khurshid Ahmed had raised the matter through a point of order, quoting a Feb 13 report in The Sunday Telegraph newspaper that said the admission came during private talks in Brussels at the end of last month between European Union officials and senior ministers from Pakistan and India. "This is untrue... and (also) Pakistan is not involved in any such disclosure," Mr Sajjad said.
