ISLAMABAD: The federal government seemed feigning ignorance in the National Assembly on Wednesday to belittle widespread reports of migration of people for fear of their lives from the troubled Balochistan province, angrily rejecting a figure of more than 300,000 for the past 10 years given by a respected rights group.

A government minister and a parliamentary secretary appeared ill-prepared when the issue came up in the house through a call-attention notice from five lawmakers of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), who cited the figure given by the non-governmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and complained of lack of government response to the issue.

Know more: 300,000 people have left Balochistan, says HRCP chief

But instead of what the government could have done to help the migrants or to counter the trend, the focus shifted to figures after the parliamentary secretary for interior, Mariam Aurgangzeb, said the data received from the Balochistan government through the National Counter Terrorism Authority showed migration of only 5,000 people following the death of renowned Baloch nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti in a military operation in August 2006.

PPP members cite HRCP figure

As she expressed her unawareness of the source of the opposition figure, one of the movers of the call-attention notice, Azra Fazal Pechuho, referred to an HRCP report issued in Quetta on Oct 13 and recalled that the figure of over 300,000 included 200,000 Shias of the Hazara community reportedly relocating to other major cities in Pakistan and abroad.

The migrants, according to the HRCP report, also included around 10,000 Hindus, 300 Parsi families, 400 members of the Zikri sect and the remaining about 90,000 people belonging to Punjabi- and Urdu-speaking communities who left the province to avoid violence.

While Ms Aurangzeb said the federal government had to go by the figures provided by the provincial government in the absence of any other data-collection mechanism for this, the Minister for States and Frontier Regions, retired Lt-Gen Abdul Qadir Baloch, said he was alarmed by the call-attention notice’s “totally exaggerated” figure of migrations from his home province.

Further, he said that relating the migrations to ethnic groups “amounts to spreading hatred” between them.

“A figure of 5,000 to 10,000 can be correct,” he said, but not that “totally exaggerated” one.

The ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N, which also rules the Punjab province, came under some opposition criticism for a police baton-charge on a demonstration of blind people demanding jobs earlier in the day in Lahore, after the house adopted a resolution to mark the International Day of People with Disabilities, calling for provision of special facilities and implementation of job quota for them.

The resolution, moved by PPP member Shazia Marri, urged the government to ensure adequate facilities such as ramps, elevators and other provisions for the mobility of what it called “people with special needs”.

Speaking on behalf of a rebel member of the boycotting Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, Musarrat Zeb, Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party chief Mahmood Khan Achakzai told the

house that banks and other financial institutions had stopped sanctioning loans and issuing credit cards to people in Swat valley apparently as a consequence of militancy that the area went through in recent years.

Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq referred the matter to house committee on finance.

Published in Dawn December 4th , 2014