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ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly passed the new Rs2.76 trillion federal budget on Wednesday amid some theatrics and new tensions between the two main political parties ahead of elections in Azad Kashmir where they are confronting each other.
A high drama marked the start of the day’s sitting when PML-Q’s minister of state for interfaith harmony and minorities affairs, Akram Masih Gill, led a protest ‘dharna’, or sit-in, at the steps of the speaker’s dais against the devolution of his ministry to provinces under the Eighteenth Amendment, provoking a sack warning from Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.
And then, immediately after the house passed the Finance Bill, which will give effect to the budget for fiscal 2011-2012 from July 1 after rejecting several amendments from the opposition PML-N, another PML-Q member, Marvi Memon, announced her resignation as a member of the house after virtually disqualifying herself by voting against the money bill in defiance of her party’s directive to support it.
The member seemed to have decided her fate on the day Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Sheikh presented the budget to the house on June 3 when she joined a noisy PML-N rumpus during the minister’s speech after tearing up some budget documents in front of the prime minister.
When other members of her party, like the rest of the coalition partners, said “ayes” for the finance bill, she repeatedly shouted “no, no”, making herself liable to disqualification for violating a constitutional obligation for members of a political party to follow the party directive in voting on a money bill, as also in a vote of confidence for the prime minister.
Tensions mounted after PML-N member Khwaja Saad Rafiq interrupted PPP chief whip Khurshid Ahmed Shah’s reply to a long statement read out by one-time loyalist of former military president Pervez Musharraf to denounce her party’s last month’s decision to join the PPP-led coalition and the government’s performance over the past more than three years of its existence.
A stinging reprimand from Speaker Fehmida Mirza silenced Mr Rafiq until Mr Shah made his reply, accusing Ms Memon of following double standards in view of her own and her father and former information minister Nisar Memon’s association with a dictator and PML-Q parliamentary leader and housing and works minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, also spoke of persistent violation of party discipline by the departing member after being elected to a special women’s seat from Punjab although she belonged to Sindh province.
But then Mr Rafiq, besides objecting to Mr Shah’s right to respond to Ms Memon, criticised Asif Ali Zardari for what he saw as indecent language used by the president about PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif in a speech on Tuesday night.
Mr Rafiq’s outburst and protests from the treasury benches seemed to reflect the mood of rival campaigns for the June 26 elections for a new Legislative Assembly in Azad Kashmir, where Mr Sharif has been criticising the president and the government, accusing them of corruption, in recent speeches to public rallies in support for his party’s candidates.
In an apparent response to those speeches, President Zardari referred to the PML-N leader as “Maulvi Nawaz Sharif” in a speech at Naudero on Tuesday night marking the 58th birth anniversary of his assassinated wife and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and accused him of seeking to divide the army and pitting the government against the military.
Mr Gill’s obviously irresponsible role in leading the sit-in by four lawmakers from non-Muslim minority communities --- three from PML-Q and one from PML-N --- apparently angered the prime minister who said a “minister should behave like a minister” and warned him that he could remove the minister of state from his job unless he withdrew from the protest.
But Mr Gill, who had come to the house for his dramatic show dressed in a black western suit, would not budge, until two other ministers of state of his party, Sardar Bahadur Ahmed Khan Sihar (defence production) and Sardar Shahjehan Yousaf (health), escorted him to his desk with some physical effort while the house speaker too denounced the erring member’s act as unworthy of a cabinet member.
It appeared the PPP and the PML-Q discussed the episode afterwards as PML-Q’s Senior Minister Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, who came to the house much later, was seen having a chat with Mr Gill, possibly for a reprimand, and later had a word with the prime minister, who was seen pointing to the place where the ‘dharna’ was staged.
THOUSANDS KIDNAPPED: Earlier, in response to a call-attention notice from five ruling coalition members, Interior Minister Rahman Malik acknowledged an increase in kidnapping cases in the country, saying more than 15,000 people were kidnapped last year, including 13,497 from the Punjab province, and that some children among them could have been used by terrorists as suicide bombers.
The figures of kidnapped people for other areas were: 1,293 from Sindh, 273 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 250 from Balochistan and 52 from Islamabad.
The minister, who gave no figures for the current year, said all provinces had been directed to take special measures to prevent kidnappings while a task force to deal with the issue was also working.
Mr Malik told the house that authorities were keeping a strict watch on madressahs in Islamabad for possible links with militants and that an agreement with Wafaq-ul-Madaris overseeing these institutions was on the anvil to make madressah managements responsible for the activities of their students.
