May 03, 2008	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 26, 1429

ISLAMABAD, May 2: The opposition in the Senate was on Friday divided on apportioning blame for the country’s severest price hike now prevailing, with the main group of President Pervez Musharraf’s loyalists shifting responsibility to the month-old government and his opponents targeting the previous one.

Opposition leader Kamil Ali Agha of the formerly ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) launched a histrionic assault on the new government for what he said could be the speediest price rise in history at the start of a debate on shortages and high prices of food and other necessities, only to receive an immediate snub from Jamaat-i-Islami parliamentary leader Prof Khurshid Ahmed.

Mr Agha’s tirade, coming a day after the leaders of the two main parties of the ruling coalition renewed a pledge to reinstate about 60 superior court judges deposed under President Musharraf’s controversial Nov 3, 2007 emergency by a new deadline of May 12, seemed to reflect a possible unease in the pro-president camp over the development, which the senator ridiculed through a typical loud-mouthed lexicon that probably earned him the spot of opposition leader over more senior party leaders like long-serving former Senate chairman Wasim Sajjad and PML secretary-general Mushahid Hussain Sayed.

“From the opposition side, we will ask (the publishers of the) Guinness Book of World Records to check if the speed of price increases in Pakistan in a few days has been the fastest in world history,” Mr Agha said after holding Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani’s government responsible for the latest upsurge in prices, particularly of food and petroleum products, and voicing fears that gas and cement prices too would soon be increased.

“Now only air is left to be taxed, which may be done in the next budget,” Mr Agha said jocularly and, in a reference to PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari’s reported dislike for the use of a countdown about the original April 30 deadline for the reinstatement of the sacked judges, asked: “What will you do about a countdown begun by the people against the price hike?”

Prof Khurshid Ahmed, whose party sits on the opposition benches although its Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal colleagues from the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam of Maulana Fazlur Rehman have shifted to the ruling coalition, said although it was the opposition’s job to keep a watch on the government of the day, he regretted that the opposition leader had ignored the failures of those who had been in power for the past five years or of more than eight years of President Musharraf.

He quoted a survey as saying 62 per cent of the country’s population held the previous government’s policies responsible for the prevailing price rises while the rest blamed hoarders and other factors.

Mr Ahmed, who is also an economist, asked the government to take people into confidence about the situation, adopt a policy of intervention in the market in support of low-income groups, give relief to the worst-affected, keep control over hoarders, and change rather than continue the economic policies dictated by foreign donors that led to the present state of the economy.

More difference of opinion in the opposition ranks is likely to be witnessed when the debate resumes on Monday at 4pm because of an expected sympathetic view to be taken by Jamaat senators about the present government and the recent formation of a “like-minded group” of PML senators who are critical of the performance of the previous cabinet of former prime minister Shaukat Aziz.