By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s upper house descended into a sustained exchange of political recrimination on Tuesday as senators from across the opposition tore into the government’s budget for 2026-27, with PTI’s parliamentary leader in the Senate accusing the ruling coalition of presiding over five consecutive years of broken promises, institutional failure and economic mismanagement.
Barrister Syed Ali Zafar, leading PTI’s Senate bloc, delivered what amounted to a wholesale indictment of the PML-N-led government’s fiscal record, framing the budget not as a plan for national recovery but as confirmation of an administration that has run out of ideas and is now recycling excuses. He called it a “budget of broken promises” built on what he termed “eleven deadly sins” — eleven areas of national life, from agriculture to education to energy, that the government had either neglected or actively made worse.
“Every budget must have two objectives,” Zafar told the Senate. “It must provide trickle-down benefits for the poor, and it must set out a credible strategy for economic growth and job creation. Unfortunately, this budget fails to achieve either objective. It neither provides meaningful relief to the common citizen nor sets out a credible long-term plan for economic development and job creation.”
The senator’s list of the government’s omissions was exhaustive: no long-term growth strategy, no industrialisation policy, no coherent approach to an agriculture sector haemorrhaging foreign exchange through rising imports of cotton, wheat and sugar, no roadmap to boost exports, no job creation strategy for a swelling youth population, no credible plan for the IT sector, no solution to circular debt or the country’s chaotic energy policy, no provision for dams or water conservation despite intensifying pressure on the Jhelum and Chenab rivers, no response to climate change, no strategy for population growth — and, he said with particular force, no serious commitment to education.
“Education is the foundation of progress and prosperity,” Zafar said, “yet the government appears to have neglected it entirely. It is as though the government does not wish to spread the light of knowledge among the people but is instead content to leave them in the darkness of ignorance.”
The senator was withering on the government’s pattern of blame-shifting across what he noted was now its fifth consecutive budget. The first, he said, blamed PTI. The second repeated the same line. The third offered no progress. The fourth blamed the IMF. The fifth now points to external actors — the United States and Israel — as responsible for Pakistan’s difficulties.
“The real reasons for the government’s failure are much closer to home,” he said. “The first is incompetence. The second is the absence of political stability. A government that does not enjoy the support of the public cannot provide a compelling vision.” He added that ordinary Pakistanis still regarded Imran Khan as their true leader.
Zafar was careful to distinguish between malice and incompetence, settling firmly on the latter. “One conclusion is unavoidable: the government’s inability to solve the country’s fundamental problems stems from incompetence. The persistent failure to identify and address the root causes reflects not merely poor policy choices but a broader failure of governance and economic management.”
His broader case against the government rested on what he described as ten broken records of failure and seven indicators moving in the wrong direction simultaneously: exports, living standards, economic growth, investment, the value of the rupee, business confidence and the credibility of the government itself.
On the official growth target of four per cent, he was contemptuous. “A tortoise with arthritis could move faster,” he said, adding that for the current administration, “perhaps even standing still is considered an achievement.”
On taxation, Zafar accused the government of an almost pathological fixation on squeezing revenue from those already in the tax net — principally the salaried class — while leaving vast untaxed sectors entirely undisturbed. “The government appears determined to squeeze the last drop of blood from the bones of the salaried class,” he said, calling the approach “madness” when repeated tax hikes had demonstrably failed to generate growth.
He dismissed the government’s own characterisation of the budget as a “stabilisation” plan with a phrase that drew attention from the gallery. “Yes, this is indeed a stabilisation budget — but it is a stabilisation of poverty, a stabilisation of hardship and a stabilisation of the hopelessness faced by ordinary people.”
On the government’s much-cited primary surplus, Zafar argued that it was being achieved at a direct cost to Pakistani families. “Families are being asked not to send their children to school, not to spend on their mothers’ medicines, not to meet other basic needs, so that the savings can instead be used to pay debt and interest.”
He reached for a final analogy to describe the government’s approach to structural economic problems: a repairman who, confronted with a leaking roof, never fixes the roof but simply asks for more buckets to be placed beneath it. “The roof is still leaking. The problem has not been solved. Yet instead of repairing the roof, the government is now asking the provinces to give up the very bricks needed to keep it standing.”
Zafar was not alone. Maulana Attaur Rehman, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl’s parliamentary leader in the Senate, raised the deteriorating security situation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as inseparable from any serious discussion of economic recovery, arguing that stability could not be achieved while peace remained elusive in KP and Balochistan. He said conditions in KP had become so dangerous that he himself felt unsafe when travelling to the province. He also raised the imposition of a tax on tobacco — a significant crop in KP — and made pointed accusations about electoral fraud in Gilgit-Baltistan, claiming his party’s candidates had been defeated through rigging. “This is the same complaint the PPP is making,” he said. “On election day in Gilgit-Baltistan, the polls were rigged.”
PTI Senator Mushal Azam was more blunt. She rejected the budget outright, warning the government that public anger would have consequences if economic hardship continued. “The people need two meals a day, not lollipops,” she said.
PPP’s Zameer Hussain Ghumro offered a somewhat more measured line, calling for additional welfare incentives to be incorporated into the budget while stopping short of outright rejection.
The government’s principal response came from Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, who argued that the opposition’s critique ignored the condition of the economy that PML-N had inherited — one that he said had been on the verge of sovereign default. “When we presented the first budget, we were insolvent. There was always the danger that we would default today or tomorrow. The IMF bailed us out with strict conditions, which we are now bearing,” he told the Senate. “But we have become solvent. Our economy is breathing; it has left the ICU.”
He acknowledged that the destination remained distant. “I will not say that we are reaching the stars,” he said, “but our trajectory bears witness that in one or two years we will reach a place where Pakistan achieves a growth rate of six to seven per cent.”
Asif spoke at length about terrorism, describing it as a problem with roots stretching back to the 1950s and urging collective responsibility rather than partisan point-scoring. He said both the KP and Balochistan crises ultimately traced to Afghanistan, and described his own visits to Kabul — alongside senior officials including the then-DG ISI — at which the Afghan leadership had verbally agreed to cooperation but declined to commit anything in writing. He acknowledged the sacrifices of 4,317 military personnel, law enforcement officers and civilians killed in counter-terrorism operations since 2022.
Railways Minister Hanif Abbasi took a combative tone toward PTI members, invoking what he described as his own imprisonment and political persecution under the previous government. “We all faced prison terms and political victimisation under your regime, but we did not raise such a hue and cry,” he said.
MQM-Pakistan’s Health Minister Mustafa Kamal used the debate to renew his party’s long-running critique of the National Finance Commission Award, describing the formula — which he said was eighty-two per cent population-based — as inherently flawed because it incentivised provinces to maximise population figures rather than improve service delivery. He said there was no mechanism to ensure that federal allocations actually reached the grassroots.
Minister for Religious Affairs Sardar Muhammad Yousuf made a related complaint, accusing the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government of distributing its NFC funds unjustly within the province — specifically at the expense of the Hazara division.
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