KARACHI: The Sindh Assembly on Monday mourned the death of a medical student during crossfire between police and fleeing robbers in North Karachi and unanimously asked the provincial government to contact her university to award her an MBBS degree posthumously.

“The awarding of this degree will certainly not ne an equal compensation to the loss of a life full of dreams and youthfulness; yet it may serve as a token of consolation for Nimra’s widowed mother and her guardians, the maternal uncles,” said a resolution jointly moved by the opposition Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan and ruling Pakistan Peoples Party.

MQM-P’s Wasim Qureshi and Mohammad Hussain and PPP’s Heer Soho moved the resolution during the day’s session presided over by Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani.

The resolution called for a detailed investigation into the incident that should fix responsibility on those who fired the weapon and take legal action against them.

MPAs demand blue passports for spouses, children

Nimra Baig was a final-year student at the Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS) who was shot fatally during the exchange of gunfire between the police and robbers last Friday.

Sindh Local Government Minister Saeed Ghani said the government would take up the issue of the demand made in the resolution about awarding of degree to Nimra with the DUHS authorities. He said naming any street or a police station after her could be done by the government.

He said the Karachi police chief had already formed a high-level inquiry team, which was investigating the incident. “It will be made sure that if anyone from the police was involved in this incident, [they] should get punished.”

He said unlike a Punjab minister who sided with the police upon the Sahiwal incident, the PPP’s Sindh government had always condemned such incidents and sided with the victims.

Govt had no role in police recruitment

Mr Ghani said that the mechanism for the appointment in the Sindh police had been designed in the apex committee and the same was being followed for new recruitments and the government had no role in it.

He admitted that there should not be any political interference in the matters of the police, yet, there should be a role of the elected government to oversee the force and not leave it unsupervised.

“We are the people who are answerable to the assembly, but the one who is responsible for something, should also have certain control and oversight on the same, which is not the case of the Sindh government.”

He said Sindh was the only province where its provincial government had no control over police, as the chief minister could not influence his office on a single constable. The minister appreciated the police’s role in bringing peace to the city; however, he said it still needed to be improved.

‘A symbol of fear’

Leader of the Opposition Firdous Shamim Naqvi said instead of being friends with the citizenry, police were a symbol of fear in the whole country.

He said the police station, in whose jurisdiction Nimra was killed, should be named after her so that it should remind every policeman about the dangers of random shooting.

“She was so young, full of dreams and that incident wasted everything the poor family had so arduously built brick by brick,” said Wasim Qureshi of the MQM-P.

Mr Hussain said it was the third such incident in a few months in which citizens had been fatally shot. He asked for the reason behind the occurrence of such incidents.

He said elsewhere in the world the law enforcement agencies were not that trigger-happy. He called for legislation to discourage recurrence of such incidents.

He said instead of creating a sense of security, the police were creating fear among the people.

MQM-P’s Khwaja Izharul Hasan lamented that Nimra fell victim to the “criminal ignorance” of the police department. “The authorities should investigate who fired the bullet that killed her.”

Heer Soho demanded an investigation into the incident and asked the government to take measures that could prevent such incidents in which people became collateral damage.

She said focus be made on the training of police. However, a single incident should not demonise the whole department, as the same force had played a key role in returning elusive peace to the city, she added.

She said the victim should be awarded a medical degree posthumously; in addition to that some certain institutions could be named after her.

Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s Khurram Sher Zaman claimed that the Sindh government had shown least interest in maintaining law and order in the province, Karachi in particular.

He said his party’s lawmakers had been demanding a modern and improved police law to which the government had turned a deaf ear.

Grand Democratic Alliance’s Nusrat Sehar Abbasi demanded that more than 6,000 policemen, who had been deployed to protect VVIPs, should be withdrawn for protecting common people.

Women Development Minister Shehla Raza said steps should be taken to avoid such encounters in thickly populated neighbourhoods.

MQM-P’s Jawed Hanif said the society was enduring brutalisation on the part of the state’s institutions.

PTI’s Rabia Azfar said adventurism among the police force was on the rise alarmingly as young policemen were holding military calibre weapons with little knowledge about how to use them.

PPP’s Marui Rashdi said the police should be trained on modern lines; however, she added, the same police along with other law enforcement agencies had rendered sacrifices in making the city peaceful again.

PTI’s parliamentary party leader Haleem Adil Shaikh criticised the female medico-legal officer at a major hospital for avoiding the post-mortem examination of Nimra.

MQM-P’s parliamentary party leader Kanwar Naveed Jameel said that apparently the “blind bullet” that fatally hit the young woman was fired by the police as police were chasing the robbers who were between the rickshaw and the policemen.

However, he said the incident merited an impartial inquiry and the government should compensate the family.

Speaker Durrani put the resolution before the house and declared it carried unanimously.

PA wants blue passports for family members

PPP’s Marui Rashdi demanded that the Sindh government take up the matter regarding issuance of blue [official] passports to spouses and children of all members of the provincial assembly with the federal government.

She said at present only MPAs were eligible to have blue passports, but their children and spouses should also be given the same facility as was being applied in the National Assembly and Senate.

MQM-P’s Mohammad Hussain said he had got similar resolution passed in 2014, yet families of the members were not being given the facility.

Ms Rashdi said the first resolution on the same issue was passed in 2008. The resolution was passed unanimously.

Earlier, replying to a calling-attention notice by MQM-P’s Rana Ansar, the parliamentary affairs minister said the business rules of the law on domestic violence had already been notified in 2016. However, the government would make certain amendments to make it more effective.

Ms Ansar said because of a lack of implementation of the law, domestic violence was not being discouraged as per the spirit of the act.

To another calling-attention notice by PPP’s Heer Soho, Education Minister Sardar Shah said 15, out of 50, English-medium schools in various districts had been built and one was near completion.

He said the department was mulling over establishing a separate directorate to run those schools.

Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2019