And it seemed likely the shelved project to build a huge multi-purpose dam over the river Indus at Kalabagh in the Punjab province would continue to provoke tensions in the house during the remainder of a general debate on the new budget unless major parties decide to abstain from the highly divisive issue for the time being.
A poetess from Lahore, Bushra Rehman of the opposition PML-Q, ignited the fray by calling for reviving the shelved project, to cheers from other members of her own party and the rival PML-N from the Punjab province, who were countered with “no, no” slogans led by Pervez Khan of the government-allied ANP.
Then came a bombardment of shouts from well-attended PML-N and PML-Q benches that drowned the “no” slogans, which were also joined by some PPP members from Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa although the ruling party as a whole, whose attendance in the house at the time was sparse, did not appear to be interested to join the fray.
Calm was restored with the intervention of Deputy Speaker Faisal Karim Kundi, who was chairing the proceedings, and PPP chief whip and Labour and Manpower Minister Khurshid Ahmed Shah.
Ms Rehman, a one-time loyalist of former military president Pervez Musharraf, referred sarcastically to the change of name of former North West Frontier Province to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa through the 18th Amendment and said if this could happen “then Kalabagh dam will also be definitely built. It is not a dead issue”.
After PML-N's Rohail Asghar called on both sides to be clam down and listen to each other's point of view with patience, more hostile shouting prevented ANP's Pervez Khan from responding after he only said that insisting on Kalabagh “negates democracy” -- before he could say why.
PML-N lawmaker Mohammad Hanif Abbasi from Rawalpindi, a former member of Jamaat-i-Islami, seemed to go too far by repeatedly challenging the ANP member to say “Pakistan Zindabad” to prove his loyalty to the country while his side did not let him speak.
It was after a lot of persuasion by the chair and the PPP chief whip that members of the two PML factions allowed the ANP member to recall that despite its opposition to the partition of the sub-continent at independence in 1947, the then leadership of his party had “raised the slogan Pakistan Zindabad in the country's first Constituent Assembly” by taking oath of loyalty to the new country and to explain that he regarded insistence on Kalabagh as negation of democracy because the assemblies of three of the country's four provinces - Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan - had passed resolutions against the project.
Earlier during the debate, PML-Q's Hindu member from Sindh, Kishen Chand Parwani, staged a token walkout after alleging misuse of funds of the minorities' evacuee trust property even to the extent of meeting Haj and Umra expenses of Muslims and threatening that his community could take the issue to international forums like the United Nations if a judicial commission was not formed to probe the matter.
Minorities Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti promised that the government would not allow any such irregularity to happen as he also spoke about plans to set up a hotline for minorities to assist victims of excesses and do away with discriminatory laws. PPP veteran Zafar Ali Shah, talking mainly about his home province of Sindh, said civil servants in districts were behaving like “personal servants” of ministers and not implementing government policies and at times scheming to “make us fight each other”.
He called for a “government rectification”, with a warning “If we also fail, then people will say bring a caliph.”
PML-N's Ayaz Amir asked the government to take a considered, correct position vis-Ã -vis the perceived new positioning by Nato, the Afghan government and Taliban in Afghanistan and also consider how to deal with the forces of extremism seen on the march in Punjab.
PPP's Mir Munawar Ali Talpur made a forceful speech to defend the budget and government policies, rejecting some opposition doomsday scenarios in the last of 17 speeches of the day, before the house was adjourned until 11am on Wednesday.
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