FROM A RINGSIDE SEAT

The debate on cut motion cruised along nicely, and even the Speaker was indulgent towards the Opposition at the National Assembly on Thursday morning.
At one point, Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain even delivered a verbal spanking to Information Minister Muhammad Ali Durrani for suggesting the Opposition parties organise their All Parties Conference at Islamabad rather than in London.
'You are provoking the Opposition; you don't have the right to tell them how and where to arrange their meetings and conferences,' he told Durrani and denied him the floor for a second time.
The intervention came after Fareed Piracha suggested that the House move a second Resolution on the Rushdi issue. The UK government was closing its eyes to the mounting protests in the Muslim world against the knighthood bestowed on a despicable individual who had the temerity to blaspheme against the holy person of our Prophet (PBUH).
Speaker and Sher Afgan Niazi remarked that the government had acted strongly on this issue and even summoned the British High Commissioner to the Foreign Office, but it was against House tradition to write a new resolution.
On this issue, but in a different venue, we heard a Muslim South African scholar Ebrahim Musa comment that he respected the views of the august legislature, but we seem to be on an errand promoting Rushdi's books. He would earn close to a million dollar with the sale of his books. Sometimes we think with our feet and forget to use our heads.
At lunchtime, the Opposition made good the threat it made Wednesday. Led by Khurshid Shah quite a few of them went to the Speaker's office to give him a notice signed by 31 Members under Article 63 (2) of the Constitution to seek Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz's disqualification as Member of National Assembly, on the charge of tinkering with the Pakistan Steel Mills and gifting it away at a throw away price.
Within minutes after sending the reference, the Opposition addressed a news conference at the Cafeteria under the leadership of Sherry Rahman, Fareed Piracha, Khwaja Asif, Liaquat Baloch,Saad Rafique and Maulana Mehnati. Baloch spoke first confirming that the Speaker had passed over the document to NA Secretary Major Ziaul Haq (Retd).
Sherry Rahman emphasised that the reference was the work of the joint Opposition parties, to register protest at the clumsy situation of the country in which the budget had lost validity. Khwaja Asif went on record that the reference was based on issue of the Steel Mills - not on personal behaviour- and he now waited how soon the Speaker would forward it to the Chief Election Commissioner because, as he put it, 'the Speaker was a mere post office.'
However, within minutes a TV channel was throwing up the news that Khwaja Asif had threatened to send one more reference concerning the prime minister, and this time it had to do with a recent story published in a US news magazine describing his meeting with a top American state woman official. This meant that the Member had recanted and was prepared to deal with personal remarks just as much as the former reference tabled in his office nine days ago.
As we returned from the Opposition's news conference, we ran into a federal minister-and he shall remain un- named who was perturbed at the battle of references.
He said the new reference is the child of the first reference, and said politics of the country was really getting out of control and there would be no end to this. This reverts to Imran Khan's statement that the same yardstick applied to all the Members of the House and according to the same measure the entire House would become empty.
At one point during the proceeding, Fauzia Wahab drew the Speaker's attention to help two women who were evicted from their house and were thrown on the street at Karachi. Officials from the Abandoned Properties Department were committing violence on these two women who needed state's help. Chaudhry Amir Hussain said he did not know details but he would ask the Interior Minister to do his best in this case.
The bloody incident of Karachi on May 12 came in to focus again during the cut motion debate relating to the Interior Ministry. By the way, one discovered that the Ministry had quite a large empire touching many aspects of an individual's life. One Member mentioned in the House that it was the second largest Ministry after the Prime Minister's.
The Ministry not only dealt with law and order problems -a provincial subject but also had the charge of Rangers, Constabularies, civil armed forces, machine-readable passport, cyber crime, the CDA Islamabad Zoo, the Parliamentary Lodges and in fact you name a human activity and you will find that it belonged to the Interior Division's domain.
In the debate, Nayyer Bukhari again raised the matter that Islamabad enjoys provincial status with a chief minister, an assembly and control over its police departments as promised in Local Government's ordinance.
Here we can reproduce the remark about the current year's budget made by a top economist, Dr A R Kamal. He said the budget lacked transparency; moreover, there was nothing in it. Dr Kamal said this not at the Assembly but in a different venue; however, it justifies the Opposition's criticism.