LAHORE, Nov 21: Opposition leader in the Punjab Assembly Qasim Zia says the house has failed to ensure supremacy of the Constitution, law and elected representatives and instead served as a tool in the hands of a dictator during its three-year tenure to be completed on Nov 24.

At a press conference here on Monday, he said the rulers had converted the house into a centre of unconstitutional measures, damaging its democratic and constitutional image.

During the period, 51 bills were passed by the house, and of them 21 were new enactments, though mostly not concerned with the public interest, and the rest were meant for deleting or inserting some words in the existing statutes, he said.

He regretted that despite having a two-thirds majority the rulers introduced ordinances, denied development funds to opposition MPAs.

Opposition members were sometimes barred from entering the assembly premises and pushed out of the house, he lamented, criticizing the speaker for using his powers in this regard.

The government could not maintain a quorum in the house despite having 150 ministers, parliamentary secretaries and standing committee chairpersons in the cabinet, he said. The leader of the house made his appearance only occasionally during the period under consideration besides introducing horse trading, he said.

The speaker lent them his helping hand by raising the issue of parliamentary leader’s status and not forwarding the reference to the Election Commission against the chief minister, though it needed not to be filed by the parliamentary leader, he said.

About the performance of standing committees, he said out of 40 plus bodies, 24 did not meet even once during this period.

He recalled that the house passed resolutions for the LFO (May 2003) and in favour of Gen Musharraf’s uniform (Sept 2004), while an “unconstitutional” resolution was also moved against senior opposition leader Rana Sanaullah to ban his entry to the house for a certain period of time.