NA speaker adjourns sitting after noisy treasury members refuse to pay heed
The parliament was adjourned unceremoniously on Monday after members of the treasury, including ministers, continued to create a ruckus in the National Assembly despite repeated warnings from the speaker.
The ongoing National Assembly session is meant to debate over the proposed budget that was announced by Minister of State for Revenue Hammad Azhar last week. When Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Shahbaz Sharif started to speak, members of government created chaos in the Lower House, drowning out his voice.
Sharif refused to be silenced by the noise and called Prime Minister Imran Khan the "biggest liar in the country's history". The PML-N president said that his party had managed to resuscitate the economy and improve the security situation during its tenure.
Speaker Asad Qaiser repeatedly directed the noisy government members to stay quiet but to no avail, following which he adjourned the sitting until 4pm on Tuesday.
Similar scenes were witnessed in the house on Friday as well when treasury members interrupted Sharif's speech by constantly creating disturbances. Later, Minister of Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry had admitted that it was a planned move by the treasury benches to prevent Mr Sharif from delivering his speech to give a befitting reply to the opposition that had created a ruckus in the house at the time of the presentation of the budget.
Protests and meetings
Earlier, PPP senators held a sit-in outside the speaker's office to protest against the non-issuance of production orders of the party's co-chairperson Asif Ali Zardari, who is currently under the custody of the National Accountability Bureau.
Meanwhile, PPP Chairperson Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari visited the house of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl's chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman to discuss future strategy of opposition parties.
Speaking to the media after their meeting, both Bilawal and Rehman termed the proposed budget as "anti-people" and the former vowed that the opposition will not allow it to pass.
Rehman lamented that the government had turned the country into "economic slaves" and had proposed a budget that was "drawn up by an IMF (International Monetary Fund) representative".
