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LAHORE: The Punjab Assembly on Monday degenerated into a “hall of shame,” with members literally abusing each other in the worst possible language and the Speaker expunging the invectives.
After coping with 20 minutes of abusing, the Speaker was left with no option but to suspend the proceeding for 15 minutes to restore some sanity to the House.
After this 'sanity break' the members, however, retuned to pick the fight from where they had left it “ sticking to their egotist stances and justifying the language they had used against each other.
To make the matters worse, the cacophony involved a person no less than provincial minister for law and parliamentary affairs Rana Sanaullah, who was also leader of the House thanks to the absence of the chief minister.
It all started when Shaukat Basra of the People's Party stood at a point of order to grill the Treasury for “failing to check quality of drugs costing over 100 lives.”
He said: “The chief minister, who has hogged 22 ministries, must come to the House to explain the costly failure. With so many ministries, the CM can literally sit alone at his House and preside over a cabinet meeting as he himself is more than half of the so-called cabinet. With such a shining example of good governance, no doubt the province was heading for a disaster “doctors, nurses, students and teachers are on the road protesting the good governance.”
Rana stood to reply and maintained that “administrative action has resulted in young doctors' strike.” The provincial government, he said, had moved only against administrative failure of the Punjab Institute of Cardiology and the departmental, technical and professional inquiries were still underway and their findings would be executed once responsibilities are fixed. “The Punjab government has ordered suspensions (of PIC administration and health secretary) because both of them knew about reaction of the drug by January 11 and 13, respectively, but they did not convey it (the information) to the provincial government. They informed the government on January 18 when the crisis had already spun out of hand. This precisely was the point that prompted administrative action; judicial action would follow as soon as other inquiries are complete”.
But, the ministerial assurances failed to satisfy the Opposition and Basra stood again to demand the resignation of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif.
“Even road accidents in the province did not kill as many people in the last one year as dengue and the spurious drugs did. These deaths have earned the chief minister notoriety of Qatal-i-Aala (chief murderer) instead of Khadam-i-Aala (chief servant), as he likes to be called.”
The term seemed to have touched raw nerves of Rana Sanaullah who stood up to tell Basra that 'chief murderer' was the same man who had approved $15,000 (Rs1.3 million) for the foreign treatment (kidney transplant) of his (Basra's) son, relaxing the rules.
“One who gives money to save life should not be tagged chief murderer,” Rana said and lost his cool, adding: “Only a shameless person like Shaukat Basra can make such claims.”
In an apparently uncontrollable way, he fired another full volley of (unprintable) abuses on Basra who stood up to respond in kind and the entire house descended into an abusive chaos.
After the 15-minute break, some sanity returned to the House when both sides demanded the other to retract remarks, but justified their own choice of words.
The opposition refused to continue the proceedings, demanding the law minister should “show magnanimity that his stature, as custodian of the House in the absence of the chief minister, demands” and retract his remarks. But, Mr Sanaullah insisted he was ready to withdraw his remarks if Shaukat Basra did the same. Both of them did not and the Opposition boycotted the House proceedings.
Ultimately, a meeting in the Speaker's chamber decided that the Chair would watch a video recoding of the entire day's proceedings and decide who “first stooped below the moral standards” and the guilty party would retract his remarks on Tuesday morning when the House meets again.
