LAHORE:
The confusion continues to turn within the PPP on its alleged plans to organize a national protest against the federal budget, since the conflicting voices emerge from the rows of the party.
While some experts deny any plan of this type, others argue that a strategy was in process, but mainly being driven by the Punjab wing of the party, since the central part has not been completely involved in the decision.
The Popular Party of Pakistan, whose main leader Chaudhary Manzaror announced a protest throughout the country against the draft of the budget, remains a key coalition partner in the federal government.
Without its support, the Government led by PML-N would be left in a limb. Any official protest call for the central leadership of the party would indicate a support retirement for the Finance Law draft, throwing the approval of the budget for serious doubts.
However, party leaders, Express PAkGazette, suggested that Manzoor’s call was more solo flight than a coordinated party line. While some leaders in the center of Punjab are recovering behind it, the measure has not received a formal green light of the main brasss of the party.
According to experts, the protest plan was being formed as an attempt to take advantage of the growing discontent between farmers and workers who were being high and dry by government policies.
The party, upon reaching farmers and workers, would try to obtain support before embarking on any protest plan, since it lacks sufficient muscle in Punjab to go to the roads without them.
Senior Central Vice President Punjab Rana Farooq Saeed said the party had not informed them of any protest plan. He questioned under whose authority Manzoor had made the call.
However, he added that the party does not approve the budget, since it offered nothing to farmers and workers. “It would be a mistake to even call it a budget,” he said. However, despite these reservations, the party has not yet made a formal decision.
“Since we are allies in the center, we cannot give impulsive statements against the budget,” he said.
The secretary general of the Central Party, Hasan Murtaza, avoided giving a direct response on any plan to carry out a protest demonstration throughout the country.
He said they were government allies and tried to make some meaning to the PML-N for the obvious discrepancies in the budget. If the dialogue failed, he added, they would finally go to the roads.
When asked if the central part had rejected the budget, which would mean that the PPP would retain support, he said that central leadership made the decision. However, he clarified that the party would not “defend PML-N mistakes.”
“They will not carry their weight as long as they suck the life of poor people and align their own pockets,” he said.
He listed several complaints, from the failure to the renegocia of the capacity payments to the taxes of the solar panels.
When asked about the senior leader, Naveed, the recognition of which exhaustive consultation sessions with the PML-N on the budget, replied that “the consultation does not mean that their contributions are incorporated.”
On Thursday, several media reported that the PPP had rejected the federal budget for the next fiscal year and announced a national protest campaign against it.
The impression was formed after Chaudhary Manzoor Ahmad, who runs the PPP popular work office, criticized the federal government at a press conference in Islamabad for presenting a budget that favors the rich and ignores the miseries of the working class and the poor.
The PPP leader said the party had begun to contact the unions throughout the country to mobilize support for protest demonstrations. He said that the demonstrations would be carried out in all provinces before the approval of the federal budget in the National Assembly.
When the senior leader of PPP was asked, Naveed Qamar to comment on the budget, said the party acknowledged that the government was walking down a tightrope under the IMF program.
However, he also said that government policies were misaligned and that if the PPP was designing the budget, it would have been very different.
At no time during the program directly rejected the budget or announced plans for protest demonstrations.
