PPP raring to have a go at PML-N in Punjab

Babar Awan has been asked by the PPP leadership to devise a strategy for next week’s session of the Punjab Assembly, said sources.—APP photo

ISLAMABAD: A group within the Pakistan People’s Party believes the party should pay the Pakistan Muslim League-N in the same coin in the Punjab Assembly for its budget day spectacle in the National Assembly.
According to sources, former law minister Babar Awan has been asked by the party leadership to devise a strategy for next week’s session of the Punjab Assembly, when the PML-led provincial government will present the budget.
Mr Awan is expected to chair a meeting of the PPP parliamentary group in the provincial assembly on Monday.
Speaking at a news conference here on Saturday, Mr Awan assailed the PML-N for its members’ noisy protest in the National
Assembly during Friday’s budget speech, accusing them of taking the country’s politics back to the 1990s.
He said the PML-N knew that the PPP would become the largest party in the upper house of parliament after next year’s Senate elections.
He said the PML-N should wait till the general elections in 2013, but “these people are wrongly dreaming for mid-term polls”.
“We will hold by-elections wherever any seat will fall vacant,” he said in an apparent reference to reports that the PML-N might consider resigning from the National Assembly to force mid-term elections.
The PPP leader said the country could not afford a ‘Bangladesh model’ or dictatorship and the people did not consider the
PML-N a genuine opposition.
He said Punjab was under heavy debt because of bad governance. He dubbed the Ashiana housing scheme for low-income groups announced by Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif as an ‘afsana’ or fraud.
Mr Awan said the PML-N was criticising the government for its pro-US stance, but it was under that party’s government that the US had violated the country’s sovereignty for the first time when Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani wanted for a deadly shooting at the CIA headquarters, had been handed over to America.
Criticising the opposition for rejecting a commission formed by the government to investigate the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Mr Awan said the PML-N should tell the nation how many commissions it had set up on major incidents like the Aimal Kansi case and the Kargil operation during its own rule in the 1990s.
He criticised the Punjab government for not having appointed a finance minister after forcing out the PPP from the provincial coalition early this year.
PML-N spokesman Ahsan Iqbal said his party was ready to face any eventuality in Punjab Assembly as it had already faced what he called “the worst and undemocratic protest” by the PPP and the PML-Q which had obstructed the house’s proceedings for a week by creating rumpus.
“We will see the democratic attitude of those in Punjab Assembly who are today accusing us of adopting a non-democratic
attitude during the National Assembly’s budget session.”
Responding to Mr Awan’s allegation of not having set up a commission on the Kargil operation, he said the PML-N government had even sacked the then army chief, Gen Pervez Musharraf, before being toppled through a coup.
The Leader of Opposition in Punjab Assembly, Raja Riaz of the PPP, said the opposition had the right to protest in the provincial assembly over wrong policies of the government.
However, the opposition would play a positive role in the provincial assembly in line with the late Benazir Bhutto’s policy of reconciliation, he said.
He the disruption of the assembly proceedings by the PPP and the PML-Q in the past was a reaction to PML-N’s ‘unconstitutional and illegal’ step of accepting turncoats into its fold.
He said the PPP parliamentary group would devise its strategy for the budget session on Monday.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani also said in Multan that the PPP would uphold democratic norms during the presentation of Punjab’s budget.