KARACHI - Vowing to go for the next general elections with the prevailing reconciliation spirit, the PPP and the MQM lawmakers in the Sindh Assembly slammed the self-exiled leader of PML Likeminded Sindh Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim for wasting the province’s time and resources by contesting the Senate election with “small dots”.
While the PPP lawmakers were critical of expenditures incurred by the provincial government at the hands of only opposition party, the PML Likeminded, Sindh Election Commissioner Sono Khan Baloch said the Senate polls had not cost the province more than a few thousand.
Friday saw Speaker Nisar Khuhro calling the provincial assembly to order at 11:15am and calling it a day within 30 minutes. No business was kept on the Order of the Day except the Question Hour which was deferred until Monday 10am.
Earlier, the speaker termed the day “historic for Pakistan where the sacrifices of his party leadership had brought democracy back on track”.
“The democratic government we had formed is passing through a peaceful transition,” Khuhro told the lawmakers, who were hardly in number required for a complete quorum.
Law Minister Ayaz Soomro said all democrats were present in the House to use their right of self determination.
Without naming anyone, he blasted Arbab, the former chief minister of Sindh, saying those hatching conspiracies against democracy in Pakistan had come into being from the “cradle of a dictator”.
Local Government Minister Agha Siraj Durrani was the next to criticise the PML Likeminded for wasting the time and resources of the provincial government to gain media publicity. “I felicitate all here as we have won (today’s) elections against the small dots they are using against us,” he told a desk-thumping House.
Attributing his side’s victory to the reconciliation-driven policies of the PPP-led coalition government, the local government minister said the coalition partners would also contest the general elections, which he said would be held on its due time next year, with the same spirit.
The speaker looked disturbed when he saw Rafique Engineer taking the floor and lots of hand raised to follow him saying everybody seemed having intended to speak on the polling day while the time was short.Engineer, congratulating the Baloch people on the Culture Day, flayed the opposition for even not having polling agents for the election. “Those who brought us together today are not coming for the polling,” he referred to Arbab, living in exile foe last four years.
Khalid Ahmed of the MQM toed the same line and said even continued conspiracies could not been able to affect the prevailing reconciliatory climate. “Today we see the show of this reconciliation,” he added. Later in a post-session media talk, Information Minister Shazia Marri made the Likeminded for making the resource-constrained Sindh government incurring extra expenditures on Friday’s Senate elections without having a wining vote bank in the electoral college.
Baloch did not share her concern saying the expenditure was “in thousands”. “The printing of ballet papers would have cost us Rs 2,000 and the stationery not more than Rs 2,000 to 3,000,” he said.