Pakistan: Opposition parties reject federal budget for 2014-15

Opposition parties in the Punjab Assembly (PA), including PTI, PPP and PML-Q have rejected the federal budget and called it an ‘anti-people’ budget, as no relief has been given to the poor despite 8 percent raise in inflation during the first fiscal of the PML-N government.

Reacting to federal budget for 2014-15, Opposition Leader Mian Mehmoodur Rasheed and other PTI members, including Mian Aslam Iqbal and Sadia Sohail Rana, said that the government had given benefits to capitalists only and that no relief was provided to the poor. They said that all of the efforts of the PML-N government to boost up economy were favouring capitalists and that these efforts had no link with facilitating or giving direct benefit to the poor and common man. They also criticised the taxation policy of the federal government and said that inflation had risen more than 8 percent during one year and prices of necessary items had gone beyond the reach of common man. They also said that the law and order situation across the country was also very poor.

PPP Parliamentary Leader Qazi Ahmad Saeed and Deputy Information Secretary Abid Sadiqui said that most of the Pakistanis have rejected this budget as no new thing in their favour had been announced in it. The PPP leaders said that the finance minister had just read out the budget speech written by someone else. They said that the budget was just a traditional jugglery of words to fool the poor and the middle class.

They said that the people were not only facing high inflation but they were also facing the poor law and order situation, which was a big failure of the government. They said that agriculture polices of the government did not give any relief to farmers.

PML-Q legislators Amir Sultan Cheema and Khadija Umar Farooqi rejected enhancing taxes and said that despite tall claims, the federal budget was just a ‘number-game’.

They said that the budget was prepared on the basis of foreign funding; therefore, how the PML-N leadership could claim that it had broken the begging bowl. They said that only about Rs 3 per day had been added to the salary of lower classes, which could hardly help them meet their needs in the wake of unprecedented hike in prices.