MULTAN, Oct 2: The Lahore High Court Bar Association (Multan) has demanded removal of Dr Khalid Ranjha as provincial law minister for his alleged bias against the lawyers’ community of south Punjab.

The demanded was put up in the executive committee meeting of the bar here on Tuesday with its president Muhammad Irfan Wyne in the chair.

The president and secretary Khalid Ashraf Khan informed the committee about their meeting with the Punjab governor over issues concerning judicial matters in this part of the country.

They said the minister time and again disrupted their dialogue with the governor and kept on giving the matters a twist to toe his ‘anti-Multan bar’ line.

The meeting observed that the law minister had “crossed all limits in conspiring” against the bench and bar of the Multan chapter of the high court.

“The minister not only created hurdles in the posting of the law officer at Multan as per the approved strength but also blocked grant of funds for the bar”.

The meeting also saw the minister behind a move launched by a group of lawyers in Sahiwal and Pakpattan districts to detach them from the Multan bench and to affiliate them with the principal seat. However, it was told that district bar associations of the two districts had opposed the idea.

The meeting remembered that when the minister was the president of the Lahore High Court Bar Association, he had once remarked “justice has been destroyed by establishing benches just to save transportation charges.”

The Multan bar apprehended that Mr Ranjha was trying to accomplish his old agenda by using his office and the authority as the law minister. “He should be impartial as a minister of the whole province instead of showing bias against a particular area,” the meeting further observed.

The meeting decided to convene an emergency meeting of all the bars of the south Punjab to deliberate upon the situation raised due to the attitude of the minister and to evolve future strategy.