NA session: PM intervenes as new provinces debate heats up

MQM, ANP clash over proposed Hazara province, PML-N maintains cautious stance.

ISLAMABAD:

Political differences over the question of new provinces threw the house into pandemonium on Tuesday, when the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) sought a debate on the issue, forcing a temporary suspension of proceedings to cool inflated tempers.

In the meanwhile the government announced an ‘unshakeable’ commitment to create new provinces.

“I am totally in support of our [Seraiki province],” Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told the National Assembly. “If new provinces, including a Seraiki, are not created during my premiership then when it will happen?” the premier said after a day of disagreements between two of his government’s allied parties.

His speech came at the end of heated exchanges between members from MQM and the Awami National Party (ANP) over whether there should be a debate in the house on the creation of a Hazara province by carving it out of half a dozen districts in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

While the MQM demanded a separate province for Hindko-speaking communities – a large number of whom live in Karachi—in a constitutional amendment it submitted to the house, the ANP opposed the move, questioning the right of the National Assembly to debate what a top leader called ‘a purely provincial matter’. Though it opposed the creation of a Hazara province, the ANP said, however, that it was in favour of a Seraiki province.

The opposition, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), on the other hand, said there should be a consensus among all political parties before taking any decision on the creation of new provinces, which the party claimed it was not opposed to in principle.

The debate got so heated at one point however, that proceedings were suspended to cool down infuriated members of the MQM and ANP. The MQM members, it seemed, were not ready to be quelled. After the resumption of proceedings, they continued to shout slogans in favour of new provinces in the Seraiki, Hazara, Malakand and tribal regions. They were also joined by a couple of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) members in the sloganeering and desk thumping.

After initial reluctance, the government agreed to MQM’s demand to hold debate on the matter, apparently ignoring a threat by Railways Minister Haji Ghulam Ahmed Bilour of ANP, to block it ‘by force’.

Bilour said that after the passage of the eighteenth constitutional amendment last year, it was the right of provincial assemblies to change the territorial limits of their federating units and the parliament had nothing to do with the subject.

Prime Minister Gilani and Law Minister Maulana Bux Chandio, however, rejected his point of view, saying that creating new provinces was an important issue and must be debated in the National Assembly.

Gilani said that creating a Seraiki province was the ‘natural right’ of people living in the belt and no one could deny them this right.

Parliamentary leader for members from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Haji Munir Ahmed Orakzai, also demanded a separate province. The PML-N, on the other hand, remained cautious.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2012.