PESHAWAR, June 19: The exclusion of opposition’s schemes from the annual development programme, the killing of a doctor in Abbotabad and subsequent students’ violence protest caused an uproar in the Frontier assembly on Thursday.
The order was restored by Speaker Bakht Jahan Khan.
Khalid Waqar Chamkani of the Muttahida Majli-i-Amal accused the police of manhandling the brother of minister for law and parliamentary affairs, Malik Zafar Azam.
Bashir Ahmed Bilour of the Awami National Party criticised the general law and order situation in the NWFP, saying if people with clout were not safe from police harassment, the common man would feel more insecure.
Members of the provincial assembly, while condemning the incident, called for holding an inquiry in this regard.
Mushtaq Ahmed Ghani of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q drew the attention of the House towards the murder of Dr Farooq Hilal, a lecturer of the Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad, at the hands of Sardar Muazzam Khan, a lawyer and son of Sardar Bahadur Khan, former Jamaat-i-Islami Amir of Abbottabad on Wednesday.
Subsequently, students of the AMC took to the streets, suspending traffic for hours on the Silk Route, he added.
Senior minister Sirajul Haq said that Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani had asked two ministers, Sardar Idrees and Inyatullah Khan, to investigate.
He said that an FIR had been registered against the killer and police were trying to arrest him.
Referring to the budget, Bashir Bilour accused the provincial finance of trying to conceal a shortfall amounting to Rs 11 billion in the budget.
Dismissing the government’s contention that the budget was poor-friendly, he said that the people had been disappointed as they were expecting a welfare-oriented budget from the MMA government.
He claimed that the actual budgetary outlay was Rs39 billion, but the finance minister had exaggerated it by stating it to be Rs51 billion.
Terming the budget unjust, he said that it could be described as being a budget for just three districts Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu and Dir, adding that the chief minister had issued 250 directives and had altered the ADP’s magnitude.
Mr Bilour said that the 15 per cent increase in government employees salary and pensioners’ income was inadequate so far as price hike and inflation was concerned.
The government, he said, had not allocated a suitable amount for the development of the provincial capital.
Accusing the government of trying to hoodwink the general public, he said that just by renaming the interest rate to mark- up would not change anything, adding that insufficient amount had been allocation for the promotion of research, science and technology in the provincial budget.
Some treasury bench MPAs accused him of committing apostasy when he lashed out at clerics, blaming them for committing excesses under the banners of al-Shams and al-Badar in the former East Pakistan and genocides in Afghanistan in the name of Jihad.
Mr Bilour said that he was not against the Jihad but was only trying to make the clerics accept the facts.
Defending the role of Muslim clerics, Maulana Ismatullah of the MMA insisted that it were the Muslim clerics, who had groomed the people who had founded the Muslim League, winning the battle for Pakistan.
Blaming the ANP for killing of the Afghan people, he said that the ANP had been responsible for murdering Afghans at the hands of Americans.
Responding to the remarks, Mr Bilour accused the Jihadi groups of minting money during the Afghan war, destroying Afghans and their country.
The PML-Q members staged a walk out from the assembly when Maulana Mujahid al-Hussaini of the MMA from Nowshera said that the PML had created Pakistan and had also caused its fragmentation.
Despite repeated attempts, Maulana Mujahid refused to retract his statement.
Qazi Mohammad Asad Khan of the PML-Q complained that he had been denied development funds, saying he would continue to speak against the narrow-sightedness of the MMA.
Later, the speaker ordered the objectionable remarks to be expunged from the proceedings.