The opposition members on Thursday boycotted the Senate proceedings over the government’s alleged indifferent attitude in handling the matter relating to victims of the Mina tragedy and its failure to bring bodies of the deceased to Pakistan. Members belonging to all opposition parties, except the BNP-M, walked out of the house after Leader of the Opposition Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan expressed dissatisfaction over Information Minister Pervaiz Rashid’s statement on the Mina tragedy. “We are staging a walkout over the government’s callousness and its failure to bring bodies from Mina to Pakistan,” Mr Ahsan said before walking out. It is still not possible to give a definitive figure for the total number of those who perished, but there are now 89 Pakistanis known to be dead. Another 45 remain missing and government officials with any responsibility in this matter — namely supporting and advising relatives of the missing and dead — have remained monumentally incompetent. Ministers and officials responsible have dodged the questions of the media at every juncture or simply rendered themselves invisible. The religious affairs ministry that should be front and centre in this matter is nowhere to be seen and the only source of information for relatives is the website of the ministry, which gives little by way of consolation beyond listing the missing, known dead and the 309 people who were originally listed as missing but have now fortuitously been found to be alive. These ‘senior officials’ seem to have disappeared without trace and there is no information in the public domain as to what they are doing, what inquiries they may or may not have made and what they propose to do next, if anything.All of this is unacceptable, indeed shameful. If those whose job it is to rise to the occasion when a tragedy such as this occurs fall short of expectations, then heads must roll. Yet again, the ordinary people of Pakistan are treated with contempt and indifference by a government which appears to be serving nobody but itself. The government’s response and actions, or the lack of them, deserve nothing less than our collective contempt.
pk.shafaqna.com
