Combined opposition on Thursday staged a token walkout from the National Assembly to protest the sending of a 'chithi' to a PPPP lady MPA in the Sindh Assembly by a treasury member on Wednesday.
While informing the House, Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan of PPPP said that we protest and condemn the act committed by a treasury member and demanded that his assembly membership must be suspended.
Saying this, he along with PPPP lawmakers left the House followed by other opposition members, including MMA and PML-N. However, the members came back after a while.
Meanwhile, commenting on the supplementary grants on the last day of the budget debate, the opposition members severely criticised the government.
Opening the debate, Liaquat Baloch of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal said that demanding supplementary grants was in fact presenting of a mini-budget, which shows that the government had no visible control over the economy.
Despite doing every thing, he said, the government has miserably failed to remove the differences and reservations between federation and the provinces. And the government could not introduce any NFC formula acceptable to all the provinces, he maintained. Baloch opined that the basic reason of these misunderstandings was not treating the provinces according to the Constitution.
The MMA leader further said that Pakistani diplomats in different countries had failed to deliver services to expatriates, which needed to be improved.
He also objected the supplementary grants allocated for railways and Election Commission owing to their poor performance.
MMA's Maulana Shujauddin claimed that defence budget is not for protection of the country and it is being spent on luxuries of the Army, which, he alleged, was protecting American interests.
Defending the government, Muttahida Qaumi Movement's Babar Ghauri said that supplementary grants had also been used in the previous governments of the PPPP and PML-N and criticism on the present government is baseless and illogical.
Dr Farid Paracha, Sherry Rehman and other opposition members also widely castigated the demand of supplementary grants.
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