KARACHI: Deputy Speaker Rehana Leghari on Friday adjourned the Sindh Assembly’s session for another 10 days after members of the three large parties in the opposition staged a protest in the house, saying she could not preside over the sitting as she was acting governor in the absence of Imran Ismail.

Soon after the start of the sitting, members belonging to the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf rose and objected that Ms Leghari could not chair the session since she was the acting Sindh governor.

Ms Leghari said she was not the acting governor and was chairing the session as the deputy speaker.

According to rules, speaker of a provincial legislature occupies the seat of the governor in case the latter goes abroad. Currently, Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani is in the custody of the National Accountability Bureau and facing a case of possessing assets beyond means.

The opposition members said they believed that it was the deputy speaker who should be the governor and she could not preside over the sitting.

PTI, MQM-P and GDA say Rehana Leghari is acting governor and shouldn’t chair house proceedings

Soon after the PTI lawmakers, their colleagues in the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan and the Grand Democratic Alliance also rose and made similar statements.

Since those lawmakers were speaking without permission of the chair, their mikes were turned off and their loud assertions were sometimes hard to hear in the galleries.

The opposition members, barring those belonging to the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, were simultaneously speaking, thus, it was even harder to understand their exact words.

PTI’s Khurram Sher Zaman, who was the first to rise to speak on the matter, was heard saying: “At present, you are acting governor of Sindh, thus, you cannot preside over the day’s session.”

Deputy Speaker Leghari said she was in the chair and was not the governor. “It is the chair you are speaking to and not the acting governor as you claim.”

Minister Mukesh Kumar Chawla said the chair should go by the order of the day and announce Question Hour.

The matter, however, failed to subside as the opposition members refused to sit back despite repeated direction by the chair. The happenings forced the chair to decide to end the show.

“It seems no one from you wants to run the proceedings today. Thus, I adjourn the house till August 19,” she said.

Later, Haleem Adil Sheikh, the parliamentary party leader of the PTI, spoke to reporters outside the house where he claimed that after the implementation of the new Police Order, the Sindh police had become a “personal servant” of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party.

He said the Sindh police was doing nothing whenever any violent incident happened with the lawmakers belonging to the opposition parties.

He claimed the ministry of ex-local government minister Saeed Ghani “was washed away in lighter rains, and now it is feared that the chair of the Sindh chief minister would go in the coming heavy rains”.

He said: “The K-Electric has become killer electric and justice should be done to the families of those children who died of electrocution during recent rains.”

Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2019