LAHORE: Accusing the Punjab government of concealing coronavirus-related deaths in the province, the opposition parties have demanded a three-week strict lockdown in six major cities of the province to stop Covid-19 from spreading.

The opposition on Sunday also protested against the National Finance Commission (NFC) notification mentioning the provincial status of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan and suspected the move to be a part of the ‘conspiracy’ to accept the bifurcation of Jammu & Kashmir.

“A recently-leaked official report has put 0.67 million Covid-19 positive cases in Lahore only, but the government is concealing not only the deaths caused by the deadly disease but also the number of Covid-19 patients in Punjab. “We demand the government impose a three-week strict lockdown in Lahore, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad and Multan and undertake extensive testing to isolate the virus carriers and to stop the disease from spreading,” a province-level multi-party conference (MPC), hosted by the PPP, demanded.

The MPC was presided over by Qamar Zaman Kaira, while Rana Sanaullah, Kamil Ali Agha, Javed Kasuri, Manzoor Ahmed Khan and Jawad Ahmed represented the PML-N, PML-Q, Jamaat-I-Islami, Awami National Party and Barabri Party, respectively.

NFC notification about GB, Azad Kashmir status criticised

Zahid Parvez of the Awami Workers Party, Allama Ahmed Sial of JUP and Hafiz Ateequr Rehman of JUI also attended the conference.

Chaudhry Manzoor moderated the conference, which also offered fateha for those who died from coronavirus and expressed their sympathies with bereaved families.

Special prayers were also offered for doctors, nurses and paramedical staff who laid down their lives in the line of duty.

The participants of the MPC rejected official arrangements for the medical sector as insufficient and demanded protective kits and special allowances for the entire staff.

They said that the situation in the country, especially in Punjab, was extremely worrying as the government had adopted an “irresponsible attitude” towards the pandemic and that was having disastrous consequences.

They urged the federal government to pay Rs300 billion dues of Punjab immediately and give the province’s share as per population in the foreign aid being given to Pakistan by donors to fight the disease.

The MPC was also critical of the government’s behaviour towards the 18th amendment and the NFC award and accused Centre of trying to infringe upon the provincial autonomy as is evident from statements of the president, prime minister and other ministers on the issue.

Terming the NFC notification “unconstitutional”, the MPC suspected that the government move of mentioning the provincial status for AJK and GB in the notification hinted at an “international conspiracy under which both India and Pakistan are to accept the bifurcation of the state of Jammu & Kashmir between them”.

It asked the government to immediately clear its position if “it is part-II of the Kashmir bifurcation plot”.

Kashmiris and all political parties condemned this move as well as killing of innocent people in the held valley by occupying Indian forces and considered silence of the government of Pakistan on the massacre as a highly criminal act, it said.

The MPC said that the notification also hinted that the federation was adamant on usurping constitutional rights and resources of federating units and warned that the people of Punjab would suffer the most as a result of it and that all political parties would oppose the move tooth and nail.

It said that Punjab was the largest food producing region in the country but no one cared about the plight of farmers of the province. Farm input prices and electricity bills, it said, were on the rise but there was no increase in the commodity prices.

Instead the government is snatching from farmers the wheat they have stored for domestic use and as seed for the next crop.

It also lamented at poor arrangements made by the government to eliminate locusts, despite the fact that last year opposition leaders had warned of the menace in the National Assembly, Senate and provincial assemblies.

It demanded lowering of prices of farm inputs, offering relief to locust-affected farmers, restoring local bodies in Punjab instead of the so-called Tiger Force and urged the national leadership to immediately convene an MPC on these issues at the national level for making a unified strategy.

It called for taking action against and deporting a foreign woman publicly speaking against national leaders like Ms Benazir Bhutto and others.

The MPC alleged that the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had become an institution of revenge, blackmail and political engineering as it was targeting only opposition leaders such as Mian Shahbaz Shairf and others.

Talking to the media after the MPC, PML-N’s Rana Sanaullah said that if the government wished to amend the 18th amendment, it must come up with a [constitutional amendment] bill.

He said the government was rather not serious about the amendment and was raising non-issues to hide its “poor performance”.

Published in Dawn, June 8th, 2020