With 123 PTI members resigning from a House of 272 the National Assembly was left a shadow of its former self in the wake of the no confidence motion against Imran Khan.
Speaker Raja Pervaiz Ashraf faces difficult challenges in making the House functional. He had to wait for the Supreme Court’s decision on a presidential reference seeking the interpretation of Article 63A. A total of 22 disgruntled PTI members of the Lower House of Parliament who did not submit their resignations are now participating in the National Assembly session. What needs to be done is to revive the House committees that became moribund after the resignation of the PTI lawmakers.
Raja Riaz, one of the PTI dissidents, has been elected Leader of the Opposition. His election will help the government as it makes three key appointments. The government can now appoint the two missing members of the Election Commisssion of Pakistan. Their posts continue to remain unfilled because of lack of cooperation by former PM Imran Khan. A helpful Leader of the Opposition can be of use in the appointment of a new National Accountability Bureau chairman and the selection of the caretaker Prime Minister who will look after the country for three months as he organizes the elections.
To make the National Assembly fully functional, the Speaker is trying to hold talks with PTI MNAs who resigned with an aim to find if some of them had been pressured to do so and help them return to the House. What constitutes the biggest hurdle in the way of this is the lack of clarity about the life span of the House. While the ruling coalition wants the Lower House to complete its tenure till August 2023, Mr Khan wants immediate dissolution of the National Assembly followed by the announcement of the elections date which he wants to be within the next few months. This is however against the calculations of the ECP. There is a need to realise that Mr Khan not only wants early elections but also election results that suit him. He will be on the roads again if he were to lose the election, even if it were conducted in the fairest manner.
