ISLAMABAD, Sept 26: As relief teams still looked for the dead and survivors from Tuesday’s earthquake in Balochistan, a wordy duel between government and opposition politicians about alleged lack of government seriousness in tackling the calamity jolted the National Assembly on Thursday.

And, in the most bitter confrontation in the present assembly’s life of nearly four months, the two sides talked of a proverbial test of the strength of each other’s arms, after some hard-hitting remarks from Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan against an opposition walkout on Wednesday while he gave details about quake losses and relief efforts.

The remarks provoked a matching response from opposition leader Khursheed Ahmed Shah, prompting Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq to intervene to calm tempers.

It was the use of the Urdu word “tamasha” (show) by the interior minister in describing Wednesday’s opposition walkout and speeches criticising most ministers’ absence from the house that the opposition leader seized on to protest against what he called “most painful, regrettable and painful” remarks from a senior parliamentarian. “If you call our speeches a ‘tamasha’ then we can show you a ‘tamasha’.”

But tempers rose further after Chaudhry Nisar, asserting that he had used no un-parliamentary word in describing the opposition move a “tamasha”, said to the opposition: “Don’t threaten us. We are not the ones who will be terrified by threats.”

And then, with the help of Urdu proverbs, the minister hurled a stinging sarcasm that Mr Shah refused to digest: “We are aware of their ‘zor-i-bazoo’ (power of arm). Ye bazoo meray azma’ay huay hain” (These arms have been tested by me).

Mr Shah challenged the minister to go ahead “if you are so proud of your arms” and said: “It is not the first time in opposition [for us]. We have suffered and tolerated much in opposition. We have offered martyrdoms on streets and not just talked, hiding in corners.”

The previous day’s walkout came after a unanimous adoption of an opposition-sponsored resolution calling upon the government to expedite relief operations, and the minister seemed angered by the move after the treasury benches had allowed the opposition to move the resolution while deviating from the usual practice of government moving resolutions.

But the opposition had stormed out of the house after a Zuhar prayer break when only a few ministers were present, complaining of lack of government seriousness.

The two sides also clashed over the number of ministers present at the time of walkout – Chaudhry Nisar putting the figure at seven but Mr Shah insisting that only the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N’s chief whip Sheikh Aftab and a couple of other ministers were present then.

While the speaker called for a cooling of tempers, former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, vice-president of the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), also criticised the interior minister for making what he called “very provocative” speech, which he said should have been milder, calling the opposition walkout on Wednesday as means to “wake up” the government after its “muted response” to the Balochistan earthquake.

FIRE AT HELICOPTERS: While describing the government’s relief effort in Balochistan, the interior minister told the house that rockets were fired at some low-flying helicopters taking relief to an unspecified “politically disturbed” area and said that for this reason relief items would be dropped in those areas from C-130 transports planes. But he did not say if the rockets caused any damage.