Pak govt reveals defence budget after 43 yrs

This was the first time that Pakistan’s defence budget has been declassified since the 1965 war with India.

Pakistan government on Tuesday lifted the 43-year-old veil of secrecy on the country’s defence budget by presenting details of the Rs 296 billion financial allocation for the armed forces in Parliament.

This was the first time that Pakistan’s defence spending has been declassified since the 1965 war with India. Over the past four decades, budget documents presented in Parliament only mentioned the allocation for defence as a grand total.

Ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader Raza Rabbani, the Leader of the House in the Senate or upper house of Parliament, tabled papers containing the break-up of the defence budget for a debate.

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The PPP-led government allocated nearly Rs 296 billion for defence in the budget for 2008-09, an increase of almost seven per cent over the Rs 277 billion spent on the military in the last fiscal.

Rabbani said it was a historic day as details of the defence budget were being presented in Parliament for the first time. In the past, only a “one-line defence budget” used to be presented in Parliament, he said.

Former premiers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif made a commitment in the Charter of Democracy, which they signed in 2006, that the defence budget would be tabled in Parliament for debate and today that commitment had been fulfilled, he said.

“It is the first step towards the supremacy of Parliament,” Rabbani said.