ISLAMABAD, June 13: Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was briefly placed in the prime minister’s chair in the National Assembly on Wednesday, but only in a picture poster, in a dramatic move by a loyalist that caused a stir during the general debate on the new national budget.
Opposition and praise for the budget for fiscal 2007-08 mingled during a dull second day of the debate as 38 speakers from both the opposition and ruling coalition spoke in two sittings to a mostly empty house, which also saw a token opposition walkout to protest against the absence of most government ministers.
While the Nawaz poster carried by PML-N member Tehmina Daultana dramatised part of the morning sitting, a middle-class member from the usually landed Bhutto clan in Sindh province, Anwar Ali Bhutto of the People's Party Parliamentarians, provided a spirited finale of an equally listless second sitting.
Mrs Daultana displayed the poster bearing a large picture of Mr Sharif and a smaller one of jailed party president Javed Hashmi inside the house after denouncing the budget as “nothing but lies, lies and lies” and claiming that Mr Sharif, who was toppled in the Oct 12, 1999 coup by Gen Pervez Musharraf, was still Pakistan’s “legal and constitutional prime minister”.
And then, after some more remarks about perceived harm dummy prime ministers could do to the country, she went to the vacant seat of the prime minister in the house and placed the poster there.
While a surprised Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain asked the PML-N member “what are you doing”, Minister of State for Health Shahnaz Sheikh rushed towards the prime minister’s desk, which was empty in the absence of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, causing fears in the galleries about a possible scuffle between the two ladies.
But nothing of the sort happened as Mrs Daultana immediately picked up the poster from the prime minister’s seat and went back to her desk in the second row of opposition benches.While advising the army to concentrate on its basic of job defending the country’s frontiers, Mrs Daultana said: “We are not against the army, but they cannot provide clean water (to citizens) nor provide a legal prime minister. They install dummies and (by) doing so will break up this country.”
A back-bencher from the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, Ms Bushra Rahman, rose in a counter move to object to the display of the former prime minister’s picture and, in a reference to large picture of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah fixed above the rostrum, said: “This house will only have the picture of the Quaid-i-Azam which will live for ever.”
“We don’t live in palaces in Jeddah and Abu Dhabi nor make speeches in palaces in London,” she said in an apparent reference to some years Mr Sharif spent in Jeddah as a guest of the Saudi government after being sent to exile in December 2000 before moving to London in January 2006 and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's self-exile in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is the capital.
“We call President Musharraf our leader, have been saying so for five years and will say for five (more) years,” she said, provoking cries of “shame, shame” from the opposition benches.
The rest of the debate was the usual denunciation of the budget by the opposition members from the PPP, PML-N and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal alliance as pro-elite and anti-poor and its defence the PML and its allies from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the PML-F and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
