Opposition slams govt for hurriedly-called NA session

PPP demands vaccination of lawmakers on priority basis

ISLAMABAD:

Members on the opposition benches in the National Assembly criticised the government on Friday for hurriedly convening the session of the lower house of parliament, terming it an insult to the democratic norms.

Senior opposition leaders Ahsan Iqbal of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Syed Naveed Qamar of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) said that the government was not taking the parliamentary matters seriously.

Speaker Asad Qaiser chaired the session. At the outset, Ahsan Iqbal took the floor and pointed out that the members found out late last night about the session in the morning. “Even members of the union council get the notice 72 hours prior to the meeting,” he said.

“No one knew whether this session will be held, until 10 O’clock at night. The members had to rush to Islamabad after a ticker ran on TV that said that the session had been convened in the morning,” the PML-N secretary general told the house.

Iqbal’s viewpoint was supported by PPP’s Naveed Qamar. He said that convening of the session on such a short notice made it difficult for the members to reach Islamabad. “There was this notice of less than 12 hours,” he said. This, he added, diminished the sanctity of the house.

Qamar demanded that the parliamentarians should be included in the priority list of the recipients of coronavirus vaccine. “Now that the coronavirus vaccine is coming, the lawmakers should be included in the priority list,” he said.

Responding to the opposition’s criticism, State Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ali Muhammad Khan said that if the opposition had not boycotted the proceedings earlier, and instead, shown seriousness in the parliamentary affairs, this session could have been convened two months ago.

He told the house that the speaker wanted to convene a session and had called a meeting of the parliamentary committee but the opposition unnecessarily resorted to boycott of it. “Running the house is not the responsibility of the government alone but it is opposition’s too.”

During the Question Hour, the government informed the house that 15,294 Pakistanis died in accidents in Saudi Arabia between 2015 and 2020. The house was also informed that there were 37 incidents of crimes on the motorways across the country in the last four years.

The M2’s Kala Shah Kaku-Lahore section and the M1’s Swabi-Rashkai section appeared to be the most unsafe roads, where 5 and 4 incidents of crimes took place, respectively. The communications ministry said that steps had been taken to curb crime on the motorways.

In its written reply to a question from Sher Akbar Khan, the foreign ministry told the House that a total of 15,294 Pakistanis were killed in accidents in Saudi Arabia between 2015 and 2020.

Later, the session was adjourned as a mark of respect for PPP lawmaker Pir Noor Muhammad Jilani who passed away last month due to coronavirus. The house also offered Fateha for those former and incumbent lawmakers as well as their relatives, who passed away in the recent past.

The deceased personalities included Senator Kalsoom Perveen, mother of Jamaat-e-Islami chief Siraj-ul-Haq, former prime minister Mir Zafarullah Jamali, former deputy speaker Nawaz Khokhar, mother of Opposition Leader Shehbaz Sharif, mother of former president Pervez Musharraf, journalist Arshad Waheed Chaudhry and the martyred security personnel.