The opposition parties in parliament staged a token boycott of both houses on Thursday to protest the exclusion of issues they wanted to debate from the order of the day of both houses.
The opposition parties were of the view that the government introduced its own agenda for the session which was requisitioned by the opposition parties.
The government supported the motion of suspending the question hour and other business to start a debate on the issues of the opposition’s interest but applied two different principles in the National Assembly and the Senate.
The government did not oppose the debate in the National Assembly on any of the three issues mentioned in the opposition parties’ requisition for the session which included non-implementation of the Supreme Court orders by the executive, recent wave of violence in Karachi and “massive rigging and misuse of government resources” during the recent AJK elections.
However, it blocked debate in the Senate on two of the issues – non-implementation of the Supreme Court orders and “massive rigging and misuse of government resources” in the AJK elections – saying the matters involved legal and constitutional issues. The opposition parties in the Senate were of the view that all three issues were important and needed to be discussed in the House.
Opening debate on the opposition’s agenda for the requisite session, PML-N leader Khwaja criticized the treasury benches and called the alliance between the PPP and PML-Q “a bid to promote corruption culture and save the corrupt”. He said many corruption cases had surfaced in various government institutions but the rulers were reluctant to take action against the corrupt and the Supreme Court had to take suo motu notices in the Haj scam, NICL scam, Rental Power Plants (RPPs) and LGP quota allocation. Asif said Rs 750 million were being paid to an RPP plant installed in a ship stationed in Karachi but the plant had failed to generate even a single megawatt of electricity so far despite the fact that then water and power minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf had claimed that it would produce 230 megawatts of electricity on a monthly basis. He said the entire nation was suffering due to long hours of load shedding but no measure was adopted to deal with the situation.
He alleged that public sector enterprises (PSEs) were bleeding despite large amounts of money being pumped into the PIA, Pakistan Steel Mills and Railways, adding that the amount given to the PSEs was much higher than the amount being spent in the social sector.
On the violence in Karachi, Asif said innocent people were being killed in the city but the government did nothing to ensure peace in the port city, which was the backbone of the country’s economy.
MQM Deputy Parliamentary Leader Haider Abbas Rizvi said around 110 innocent people were killed in five days of violence in the Kati Pahari area.
The MQM leader said voter lists used in the AJK elections were incorrect and all political parties had shown their reservations on the electoral process.