ISLAMABAD, Aug 9: The National Assembly speaker complained on Wednesday of ‘many conspiracies’ being hatched against the lower house amid a bizarre controversy over its costs when a thunder of a minister’s invective also targeted the media.
Chaudhry Amir Hussain made the complaint during an argument with an outspoken member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, M. P. Bhandara, who attracted the ire of the chair as well as some members from both the treasury and opposition benches by repeatedly speaking about high costs borne by the national exchequer for National Assembly members.
The wordy clashes, which consumed most of the day’s sitting before the house was adjourned until 10am on Thursday, came hours before the combined opposition, mainly comprising the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, announced its decision to move a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Aug 23.
“Already many conspiracies are going on against the (National) Assembly, (and) you should not become a part of them,” Speaker Hussain told Mr Bhandara in one of the angriest exchanges between the chair and a member in the present assembly.
The altercation came after Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sher Afgan Khan Niazi asked the speaker to admit a question of breach of privilege against Mr Bhandara for “eroding the authority of this house” and accused unnamed journalists of maligning parliament and harming democracy by their writings, calling them ‘ghasiyaras’ (grass-cutters) and recipients of ‘lafafas’ (envelops of cash), provoking an immediate protest walkout from the press gallery.
“He must be taken to task,” the minister said about the member and later explained that his remarks about the press were directed at a newspaper’s resident editor in Lahore rather than those reporting from the assembly’s press gallery, who later ended the walkout on a call by the chair.
Mr Bhandara accepted Mr Niazi’s challenge of a privilege motion and called for a discussion on “our excessive expenses”.
But he provoked the chair’s fury when he said expenses should be controlled wherever possible in an estimated annual budget of one billion rupees and wondered why no report was available to members about the expenses of what he called Senate chairman’s 51 and the assembly speaker’s 32 foreign trips.
“Is your blood pressure all right?” the speaker questioned the member angrily and asked him why he had not given a report about his trip to Moscow. “Sit down, I have shown much patience,” he said, stopping the member from making any more remarks.
The speaker also disputed Mr Bhandara’s assembly budget figure of Rs1 billion, putting it at Rs98 crore – neither of them giving the budget year – and said whatever expenditure was being made was justified.
The chair again cut Mr Bhandara short when the member described the National Assembly’s Finance Committee overseeing the lower house expenses as illegal and said: “That is incorrect ... All committees (of the house) are legal.”
