A sinking ship: PTI’s inner differences its biggest adversary

Assembly session witnessed ruckus on Wednesday by party’s ‘disgruntled’ members .

PESHAWAR:

At a time when opposition parties in the provincial assembly have kept the government on a short leash by frequently calling sessions with lengthy agendas, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) internal discord is probably its biggest enemy.

The PTI-led coalition government is faced with one of the most assertive opposition in recent times, but it is the PTI pressure group that troubles the nascent government the most.

The present assembly session, requisitioned by opposition parties, started on Wednesday with the province’s law and order and health-related issues being the main items on the day’s agenda.

At the start of Wednesday’s session, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa IGP Nasir Khan Durrani, along with other senior police officers, were present in the official gallery when a lawmaker from Buner, Mufti Fazl Ghafoor, walked out in protest on a point of order over the appointment of class-IV employees in his district.

Following this, all opposition members left the house in protest, forcing the speaker to adjourn the session for 10 minutes, however, the recess stretched to over an hour.

Later, when the house was about to start the debate on law and order, members of PTI’s pressure group entered the house and two MPAs, Javed Nasim and Qurban Ali Khan, asked the speaker to allow them to speak on a point of order.

Qurban went on a long diatribe trying to explain the ‘hidden’ motives behind the Kohat rape case in which deputy speaker Imtiaz Shahid’s brother and cousin are the main accused.

The lawmaker from Nowshera then announced a boycott of the ongoing session by his group and also threatened to stay away from the upcoming budget session.

The pressure group members, around two dozen in number, then walked out of the house, with opposition members following suit.

Speaker Asad Qaiser subsequently had to send the house on another recess and directed some of the ministers to bring back the disgruntled members and ask them to end their boycott.

Three hours later, after a lot of huddling which included a closed-door meeting with the speaker and an informal chat with reporters, the disgruntled members left the assembly premises. Following their exit, other treasury and opposition members returned to the house only to listen to the announcement of the formation of a 10-member committee to investigate the Kohat rape case. The session was then adjourned till Friday while the day’s agenda was left unaddressed.

The expertise of the police chief and other senior officials who were in the house to answer lawmakers’ queries could not be availed.

In another example of in-house problems, Babar Saleem, a member of the government’s coalition partner Awami Jamhoori Ittehad Pakistan (AJIP), vented his anger in Friday’s session over the transfer of an education department official from Swabi district. The lawmaker accused an uncle of AJIP chief Shahram Tarakai, who is a senior minister, of showing ‘badmashi’ at government offices. Babar was countered by Minister for Primary and Secondary Education Atif Khan who challenged the lawmaker to prove his accusation.

On Friday, the near-empty house had on its agenda discussions on poverty, inflation and unemployment and damages caused by hailstorms across the province. However, when the time of discussing the agenda items arrived, the health issues of the province were discussed instead.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 1^st, 2014.