PESHAWAR, March 20: The NWFP Assembly Deputy Speaker, Ikramullah Shahid has said that he is not going to resign as suggested by some MPAs. Instead, he will contest the no-trust move against him on Tuesday.

Talking to newsmen here on Monday, he said the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal secretary-general Maulana Fazlur Rehman had denied involvement of any MMA member in horse-trading during Senate elections. He said after the statement by the MMA secretary-general, the government was caught in confusion over its plan to remove him from the deputy speaker’s post.

He said he had been opposing the proposal of deciding the motion by show of hands. The show of hands was not a constitutional method, it was a pressure tactics to gag his supporters in the name of party discipline inside the MMA, Mr Shahid said.

He said that secret ballot had been a general practice on all such issues in parliamentary democracies, but the MMA leaders wanted show of hands because they thought that the secret balloting might go against them. Mr Shahid said if his opponents had a majority votes against him, why they were insisting on show of hand against him.

Mr deputy speaker, who would be no more an MMA supporter after Tuesday no-trust motion against him, was hopeful about an early dissolution of the present arrangement in the province.

Mr Shahid was enjoying the support of Pakistan Muslim League, PPP (S) and the dissidents in the MMA, who would only vote for him if the voting was conducted through secret balloting, and one vote from the PML (N). The PPP Parliamentarian, whose candidate Farhatullah Babar was defeated in the Senate elections, would also side with the NWFP government.