March, 31 2005	Thursday	20 Safar 1426

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ISLAMABAD, March 30: Opposition Leader in the Senate and a People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) leader Raza Rabbani has condemned the decision of National Assembly Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain for buying a new Mercedes car worth over Rs11 million and termed it “most insensitive, imprudent, thoughtless and mocking at the abysmal poverty, economic suicides, excruciating hunger and rampant joblessness in the country.”

It may be recalled that the National Assembly Finance Committee, which was presided over by the speaker himself on Tuesday, approved the import of a latest model Mercedes car worth over Rs11 million for the speaker. In a damage control move as his party colleagues Syed Khurshid Shah and Fauzia Wahab did not oppose the decision in the committee meeting, Mr Rabbani in a statement on Wednesday called to reverse the decision saying a poor country like Pakistan could not afford such luxuries by the rulers.

The decision, Mr Rabbani said, would only increase the alienation of the common people from the elected representatives. “The parliamentarians will now be widely perceived as driven by the motivations of self-interest rather than addressing issues of the common people,” he said. Furthermore, the PPP leader said, the decision would increase the leverage of the anti-democratic forces and the establishment to paint the public representatives “black as selfish, greedy and insensitive to the plight of the masses.”

The speaker’s reasoning that a new car for him should not be grudged as the speaker of the Majlis in Iran has an aircraft is both hollow and spurious, he said. “By the same logic, the speaker may well demand an annual salary of over a million dollars as is paid to law makers in the US,” Mr Rabbani added.

Meanwhile, sources in the PPP told Dawn that the party’s high command had taken a serious notice of the attitude of the party MNAs, who had attended the committee’s meeting. They said the party’s leadership was contemplating to take some action against the MNAs for not lodging any protest in the committee’s meeting on Tuesday.