Senate session: PML-N backtracking on promises, says Aitzaz

Says the Nawaz government has failed to fulfill public demands.

ISLAMABAD:

Before elections, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) claimed resolving power crisis was a matter of 15 days. How 15 days converted into five months was a query made by the Leader of the Opposition in Senate Aitzaz Ahsan during the Senate session.

Speaking on President Asif Ali Zardari’s address to joint session of Parliament made earlier in June this year, Senator Aitzaz said that the PML-N government was backtracking on all its promises made with the people during its elections’ campaign.

“They also promised after coming into power they would stop drone strikes. You cannot capture a lone gunman from Islamabad, how would you succeed in preventing drones attacks?” asked the PPP Senator. He criticised the first two months’ performance of the PML-N government for making no efforts to fulfill promises made in its election manifesto.

Aitzaz Ahsan said the PML-N leaders fooled the masses with hollow promises to merely win their votes otherwise they were well aware of the actual situation on all the crisis the last government was going through.



Senator Aitzaz Ahsan came particularly hard at PML-N on the issue of terrorism. He said it was PML-N government in Punjab that “bribed” the terrorists and asked them to spare the province as they shared the ideology of the militants.

“In another way, it was like allowing the terrorists to freely target the remaining three provinces which they actually did,” said the Senator. One by one, the opposition leader reminded the PML-N government that on all those issues that it used to criticise the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government on were still remain unattended.

“PML-N has failed to fulfil the promises it made with the labourers, for instance, for fixing minimum wages at Rs15,000 per month,” he said. The PML-N made tall claims during the election campaigns that it would eradicate corruption and would say no to foreign loans, besides bringing down the high inflation rate.

On the contrary, the present government has done all that it promised to avoid. Complaining that media was being biased against PPP, Senator Aitzaz Ahsan said the PML-N government was already losing patience on the ongoing criticism.

“Media would soon get to know that it is Mian Nawaz Sharif in power who cannot tolerate criticism,” said Ahsan while referring to cases registered against a private TV channel in Balochistan. He said even the dictator, the former President Pervez Musharraf, could not gag the media. However, he lodged a complaint with media that it was not giving due coverage to the opposition parties including PPP, Awami National Party (ANP) and Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-i-Azam (PML-Q).

Published in The Express Tribune, August 28^th, 2013.