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ISLAMABAD: They first tried to grab the floor before Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, which could not be done on the budget day, and then shouted for 40 minutes to drown out his budget speech in the National Assembly on Friday.
Lawmakers of the opposition PML-N seemed to be on the warpath, in a warning of an upcoming stormy debate on the budget for fiscal 2011-12 beginning on Monday and possibly heightened tensions afterwards with the PPP-led coalition government.
But the PML-N, the country’s largest opposition party that has 92 members in the 342-seat lower house and rules the Punjab province, was left alone in its Friday’s job, with smaller opposition groups staying away from what turned out to be the longest and noisiest post-Musharraf parliamentary protest.
The PML-N benches, squeezed between those of the PPP on their left and some coalition allies on their right, burst into an uproar of protest after Speaker Fehmida Mirza turned down a request from a PML-N front-bencher, Khwaja Mohammad Asif, to take the floor before the finance minister’s speech, on the ground that house rules disallowed any business other than the budget speech on the day budget is presented.
Then the party members left their seats to assemble before the dais near the finance minister, chanting slogans against alleged government corruption and what they called subservience to the United States and the International Monetary Fund.
“Corrupt government unacceptable”, “Stop American dictation”, “IMF budget unacceptable” and “Stop (US) drone attacks” were some of slogans they chanted, though some cat calls and howls at times gave the show the appearance of a street protest, which was also marked by some theatrics by a couple of prominent PML-N members and a rebel member of the government-allied PML-Q.
Members of the treasury benches repeatedly cheered the finance minister’s Urdu speech by desk-thumping, often led by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani himself.
Mr Ahsan Iqbal, who was education minister in the short-lived PPP-PML-N coalition in 2008, tried to interrupt the finance minister’s speech by presenting him a ‘nan’, apparently to highlight the high price of the local bread. But the item was grabbed by Information and Broadcasting Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan, who had already taken a seat next to the finance minister apparently on the prime minister’s instructions to counter any insult from female PML-N members who formed the vanguard of the protesters and had to be kept back by their organising colleagues whenever they tried to come too close to Mr Sheikh’s mikes.
A senior PML-N female member, Tehmina Daultana, used the typical sub-continental gesture of shaming a man by hurling what looked like some glass bangles at the finance minister. The information minister again came to Mr Sheikh’s help by intercepting the bangles with her hand before they fell on the carpeted floor.
PML-Q backbencher Marvi Memon’s declared ire against her party’s coalition with the PPP woke up late on Friday when, after listening to most of the budget speech at her seat, she suddenly rushed to the prime minister’s desk and tore up pages of a pink volume of budget documents before joining the PML-N protesters in non-stop shouting.
She was soon penalised by another PML-Q female member, Ms Shahnaz Sheikh, who walked up to the protesting crowd and snatched the remainder of the budget volume from Ms Memon’s hands and threw it on the floor.
Some PML-N members kept silent while most of their party colleagues were engaged in shouting and howling, and few of them even kept a physical distance from the shouting core.
The soft-spoken finance minister continued his speech undeterred, though it was hardly audible without ear-phones fixed with the members’ desk, and ended it defiantly with a couplet of national poet Iqbal: “Tundiay bad-e-mukhalif sey na ghabrah aih uqab, ye to chalti hai tujhay ooncha urhaney key liaey” (don’t be scared of the severity of the wind from opposite direction, oh eagle! This blows only to help you fly higher).
