LAHORE, Dec 22: Though hooliganism, protests, walkout and quorum crisis as usual marked the first half of the Punjab Assembly session here on Thursday, the house in the second half, however, passed 10 bills to justify the sitting for the day.
It all started in the Question Hour when Kamran Michael, who held social welfare portfolio, responding to a question, used some words which had offensive connotation for a woman member of the house.
It naturally stoked up strong reaction from the women members, who wanted Michael to apologise for the words. The minister, however, refused to ‘oblige’, hiding behind the semantics. But it did provoke a walkout from Seemal and other women members, some of them criticising Speaker Rana Muhammad Iqbal for “saving the minister.”
Responding to a question, the minister was telling the house that Rubina Shaheen Wattoo of the PPP headed an NGO which used to arrange mass marriages and was receiving Rs20 million per year from Pervaiz Elahi government. He said the present government had now decided to snap funds for NGOs due to reported misappropriations, adding it was rather helping individuals by giving them Rs25,000 for a marriage.
At this point, Seemal Kamran interrupted the minister and claimed that she was parliamentary secretary of the social welfare department in the previous government and was still in touch with the officials who were still allocating funds to the NGO. She alleged the minister was misleading the house and she was not satisfied with the answer.
Responding to her pointed criticism, the minister admitted that “the government was still allocating funds, but only to the NGOs working for Education.”
The admission provided ammunition to Seemal who went on to criticise the minister and his contradictory claims. Instead of correcting his contradictions, the minister resorted to objectionable language, provoking his female colleagues from the Opposition. Seemal was first to walk out and Speaker sent Sajida Mir of the PPP to bring her back. As soon as she came back, the minister again stood up to insist that he had “neither said nor done anything wrong,” again provoking protest by women members.
After this Sajida Mir too walk out of the house to protest the minister’s behaviour and language. She also threw her shawl on the minister to show her anger. On this, all the women opposition members went out of the house, protesting the remarks and demanding minister’s removal.
“If Maryam Nawaz is respectable, why the government cannot ensure respect to other females as well,” Azma Bukhari of the PPP told the media outside the assembly and added: “We are also daughters of someone and deserve as much respect.”
During the chaos, someone pointed out the quorum and it was found missing. Five-minute bells failed to bring the Treasury members back and the proceedings were suspended for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, the Treasury was able to bring enough members back to the house to meet the number. Once the goal was achieved, some of the Treasury members scrambled out of the house again. Once again, the quorum was pointed out by Haji Ishaq of the PPP and the Treasury again went into frantic search for its members and brought everyone back to meet the number yet again.