LAHORE, Nov 14: Disorder remained the order of the day in the Punjab Assembly when it met here on Friday around one and-a-half hours late than its scheduled time.

Members continued to take the floor on points of order, ignoring the repeated humble requests of Speaker Rana Muhammad Iqbal Khan to allow him to run the house according to the rules of procedure and the agenda.

Immediately after recitation from the Holy Quran and Naat, PPP’s Sajida Mir raised the issue of non-provision of development funds to the women members while a PML-Q member from Jhang complained that he had been ignored in the committee formed by the government to sort out some problems of his district.

PML-Q’s Ijaz Shafi was insisting that he should be allowed to raise an agricultural issue through a point of order, though the chair and law minister Rana Sanaullah Khan said the business advisory committee of the house had fixed two days for discussion on the department.

The trend of delivering speeches in the name of point of order or supplementary questions continued even during the Question Hour. So much so that the ministers for prisons and labour, Abdul Ghafoor and Ashraf Sohna, respectively, also went off the track instead of directly answering to the ‘queries’ as only three written questions could be taken up.

This forced former irrigation minister Amer Sultan Cheema to call it a foul play and comment that as the new government was completing its nine months in power, the change the prisons minister had boasted of in his long discourse was not visible anywhere.

The speaker told him that he (Mr Cheema) was inexperienced, (so he might not have witnessed the change) as PPP’s Syed Hasan Murtaza advised the Q-leaguer that he should expect the change after nine months -- remarks that sent many women MPAs blushing.

The chair went on the defensive when Cheema said a speaker should listen more than to speak but, he pointed out, Rana Iqbal was going contrary to it. The attack made the chair so accommodative that he would oblige whenever any mover of a question insisted to see his/her query pending for the next time the two departments came up for discussion.

FATEHA: The house offered ‘fateha’ for former deputy speaker Hasan Akhtar Moakal who had died a couple of days ago. Prayers were offered also for the innocent people killed by the US drone attacks in FATA and in Peshawar suicide bombing.