MUZAFFARABAD, June 17: The opposition in the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly (AJKLA) staged a walk-out on Monday, accusing Speaker Sardar Siab Khalid of being partisan.
The opposition members went out of the house when Finance Minister Shah Ghulam Qadir, after finishing his speech, requested the speaker to suspend a rule to pave the way for the initiation of a debate on the budget document after a day’s gap on Wednesday, instead of the two days’ recess.
However, former speaker Chaudhry Abdul Majid, who was leading the opposition’s 12 members present in the house, observed on a point of order that the rule could not be suspended.
The speaker told Mr Majid that the leader of the opposition, Barrister Sultan Mahmood, had agreed at a meeting with him on reducing the gap from two days to one. Mr Majid, whose tense relations with Mr Mahmood are an open secret, said: “We are not bound to accept decisions taken behind closed doors.”
The situation prompted Prime Minister Sardar Sikandar Hayat Khan to take the floor. He said he had to leave for Sudan on June 22 to attend an OIC meeting and, therefore, he wanted the debate to start early so that he could approve if any change in the budget was indispensable.
After seeing no flexibility in the attitude of Mr Majid, the speaker held a voting on the issue and announced that the house had unanimously approved suspension of the rule and that the debate would start after one day’s gap on Wednesday.
This infuriated Mr Majid, who pointed out that the motion had not been approved unanimously but by majority vote, and led the opposition out of the house.
The speaker adjourned the session till Wednesday.
BARRISTER SULTAN: Leader of the opposition, Barrister Sultan Mahmood, has rejected the budget, terming it a “jugglery of words”.
In a statement, he took a strong exception to what he called stifling the voice of the opposition by the government.
He said the rules and parliamentary traditions demanded that the legislators be given proper time for preparation for debating the budget, but the government had violated the tradition as well as the rule.