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ISLAMABAD: Three days after the budget-day rumpus, tempers seemed cooled down in the National Assembly on Monday, with the opposition leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan toning down attacks on the government and a senior member of the ruling PPP promising there will be no tit-for-tat in Punjab.
Chaudhry Nisar, opening the budget debate despite his earlier threats he might not do so in protest, acknowledged that Friday’s shouting and howling by his party’s lawmakers, which had drowned out Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh’s budget speech, was probably “too hard”.
But he said his party had no option but to protest after disregard of parliamentary resolutions by the government.
He was referring to several resolutions passed by the lower house in the past more than three years and the one adopted by an in-camera joint sitting of the two house of parliament last month after discussing the covert US commando operation that killed Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden at his Abbottabad hideout on May 2.
The opposition leader spoke very little about the budget in which he said he hardly saw anything for people’s welfare and devoted more of his criticism at alleged bad governance of the PPP-led coalition, which he largely blamed on President Asif Ali Zardari, and proceedings of the May 13 joint sitting that he said should be made public.
But his criticism was not as fiery as most of his previous anti-government tirades.
Responding to the opposition leader’s speech, former water and power minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, who is also the secretary general of PPP’s electoral arm PPP Parliamentarians, asked the PML-N whether it would like the PPP and its allies in the Punjab Assembly to ‘besiege your finance minister’ on the provincial budget day.
“Our numbers are much bigger in the province, but we will not do it,” he said after calling for political tolerance. “We will take a democratic path.”
Mr Ashraf had not finished his speech before Speaker Fehmida Mirza adjourned the house until Tuesday morning.
