ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan did it again on Wednesday, provoking an opposition boycott of the National Assembly by refusing to withdraw what they regarded as an offensive word he used in a speech in the house.
In what seemed to be the most serious standoff with the government during more than six months of this assembly, leaders of both main opposition parties — Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI) — said their lawmakers would boycott the current house session until the minister withdrew the Urdu word ‘tamasha’ (fun) he used to describe a PTI demand for voter verification in some constituencies in the May 11 elections from fingerprints.
The development came more than a month after Chaudhry Nisar’s refusal to apologise for an allegedly wrong reply about fatalities for a certain period from terrorist attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa prompted an opposition boycott of the Senate for several days.
Wednesday’s row arose from an angry response of the minister to opposition leader Khursheed Ahmed Shah’s demand that the government remove confusion over matters surrounding voter verification, including the roles of the Election Commission and the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra), as well as ways to tackle terrorism.
The boiling point came too soon during Chaudhry Nisar’s speech when he said “a political party is staging a tamasha over voter verification from fingerprints, drawing instant protests from opposition benches and a demand from Mr Khursheed Shah that the minister withdraw the word “tamasha”, which he said did not behove a senior minister and a senior parliamentarian.
First, the minister argued that ‘tamasha” was no unparliamentary word – a view endorsed by Deputy Speaker Murtaza Javed Abbasi -- and later, in several other exchanges, he contended that he had used the word in the context of what the PTI was doing outside the house, and not about what was being said inside the house.
But the opposition benches were not convinced. Neither did Chaudhry Nisar nor the deputy speaker agree with Mr Shah’s demand that a recorded tape of the minister’s speech be played.
Mr Shah offered to apologise to the house if the tape showed the minister’s reference was about what was happening outside the house or the minister do the same if it were otherwise.
The opposition leader accused the interior minister of making the issue a matter of “his ego” and spoiling atmosphere of the house. He said as had happened in the Senate, where intervention by two other cabinet members -- Ishaq Dar and Pervez Rashid -- and the assignment of the additional charge of interior to the Minister of State for Education, Mohammad Baligh-ur-Rehman, to represent Chaudhry Nisar in the upper house cooled opposition tempers and ended their boycott.
After Chaudhry Nisar’s repeated insistence on his stance failed to convince the opposition, which, in turn, insisted on playing the tape of the minister’s speech, the deputy speaker adjourned the house for Zohar prayer just as both Khursheed Shah and PTI vice-chairman Shah Mehmood Qureshi rose in their seats, apparently to announce a walkout.
There was no change of positions on either side when the house reassembled after the prayer break, without the interior minister coming back, to hear Mr Shah announce that the opposition would boycott the session until the minister had withdrawn the objectionable word.
The Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the third largest opposition party in the house that has been siding with the treasury benches in recent months, and, more significantly, the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is a PTI ally in their KP provincial government, did not join the walkout.
Both Mehmood Khursheed Shah and Qureshi later told reporters outside the house that members of their parties would come to the parliament building on Thursday, but would stay out of the assembly until their demand was met.