LG Amendment Bill: No to no-confidence vote, Sindh Assembly makes law

"The Sindh Local Government (Amendment) Bill 2017" was passed with the majority votes of legislators in Sindh Assembly amid opposition's noisy protest. The new law is aimed at preventing the councillors from no-confidence votes against the chairmen and vice chairmen of their respective union councils and committees in the province.
The bill, which turned to be controversial, was tabled by Sindh Local Government Minister, Jam Khan Shoro.
"The chairmen and vice chairmen (of the local councils) are directly elected through public votes. Therefore, they cannot be removed from the office by the members of relevant local councils with a no-confidence vote," Shoro told the House, playing down the opposition's protest aimed at seeking a turn to speak on Sehwan Sharif shrine blast that left many people dead and hundreds other injured.
However, Sindh chief minister Syed Murad Ali Shah made a formal speech on Sehwan shrine blast telling the legislators that his government had chalked out a policy to protect the saints' tombs from terrorist attacks. He said that the blast had also killed non-Muslims.
"The blast affected some 500 people," he said, adding that around 81 devotees died in the blast of which 46 were male, 10 women and 25 teenagers younger than 15 years of age. He said that only 10 out of 383 injured are still receiving treatment at hospitals. He said three bodies of the blast still remained unidentified and unclaimed.
He claimed that the suicide bomber would soon be identified with the help of DNA and footages from the CCTV cameras. He said that Karachi was under threat from terrorists who also pose threat to several shrines across the province. He said that the Sindh government was co-ordinating with Balochistan to monitor its inter-provincial borders with that province.
"There are some religious organisations, which have links with the terrorist groups," he said, adding that his government had asked the federal government to place these terrorist organisations on watch-list. He condemned the blast and said that the attacker was not from Sindh.
After a protracted protest, the opposition denounced the Sindh government on 'poor' handling of the blast victims with no ambulances and medical aid at hospital, due to which more people died. The opposition legislators said that the government had placed no security shield to the shrine that let the terrorists strike the devotees.
MQM's Syed Sardar Ahmed said that the government should have increased the security at Sehwan shrine after the blast at saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi's tomb in Karachi, but they never did. He asked the government to fix the responsibility for security lapses.
PTI's Dr Seema Zia called the shrine blast an 'extremely painful' incident. She said that general public had no access to the medical care at hospitals in Sehwan while police was short of equipments. She asked the government to reform the police like Khyber Pakhtunkhwa did.
MQM's Heer Ismail Soho said that the CM Sindh narrated his 'story.' She said that CM Sindh should have told the house what steps his government had taken to counter terrorism. She also urged the CM to develop the province with hospitals and infrastructure.
Later, opposition leader, MQM's Khawaja Izhar-ul-Hasan told reporters that his party would challenge the hurriedly-passed amendments to the local government's law in the court.