The National Assembly organized two sessions today. Few things have been done in one or the other. “Counting the quorum,” cheap the members of Pakistan Tehreek-E-insaf of the National Assembly, as the official session began.
“We were supposed to discuss the floods and the terrorist attack in Balutchistan today, please sit down,” argued the president of NA Ayaz Sadiq while the members of the PTI moved to the exit.
One day, when Punjab is in shock of more than two weeks of relentless and uninterrupted floods, and the country is overwhelmed by residual damage to recent death floods in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan, the opposition and the government could not set aside their personal disdain for a long time to take the agenda of the day.
Thousands of citizens across the country have been moved. They are cramped in change tents and public schools, where bathrooms are rare and food supply is limited. The cattle has been uprooted and vast acres of devastated agricultural land.
Read: Has India deliberately flooded Pakistan?
This Mousson season, which started on June 16, made 884 lives and injured at least 1,176. In Biner, whole families perished in landslides launched by torrential rains while the entire villages of Punjab were uprooted.
Elsewhere, in Balutchistan, there has been a series of terrorist attacks in recent months with the last take earlier this week, when a suicide bomber has decimated 15 civilians in Quetta near a polite rally. The striker had ceased to target the rally withdrawn by the Balutchistan mengeur (BNP)-meter to protest against Dr. Mahrung Baloch of the Balutchistan Yakjehti Committee (BYC), other Baloch political leaders and a police repression against the ongoing sit-ins. The authorities of the Quetta district would have denied BNP-Mengal Lye to hold the rally.
However, our elected legislators, members of the National Assembly, continue their solid tradition of leaving intra-party disputes are higher than national concerns.
The Federal Minister of Law Azam Tarar accused the PTI of being “selfish” and of positioning their political ambitions above “needs of the country”.
However, when PTI’s lawyer, Gohar Ali Khan drew attention to the performance of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) during the floods, the live flow of the session was disturbed on the chain of the state diffuser.
Khan ignored the Minister of Law and walked in the aisle, leaving the rest of the opposition legislators. Khan said it was part of the continuous boycott of PTI’s house and set up the impromptu assembly of his party outside the premises of Parliament. Asad Qaiser led the procedure during this “Awami Assembly” – as they said. Here, a “resolution” has been adopted to extend the deadline for repatriating Afghan citizens. People aware of the question remain ignorant of the jurisdiction of this “” of the Assembly.
The Sadiq speaker took advantage of this opportunity to remind the house that PTI complains of having no space to exercise his views in the house and yet, now left when they had the ground.
While the water goes downstream from Multan to Sindh, it is obvious that the public cannot turn to the leaders of the country to comfort. Are they the representatives of the people who will bring us out of the disasters while the country is struggling with climate change and the resurrection of terrorism.
With additional Chaudhry Waqas reports
