ISLAMABAD: A day after former prime minister Imran Khan hinted at a return to the National Assembly to move a confidence vote against his successor, Shehbaz Sharif, the speaker Tuesday accepted the resignations of 35 lawmakers from his Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party, prompting the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to de-notify them.
In addition to those lawmakers, the commission also de-notified Awami Muslim League (AML) chairman Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed, an ally of Khan. According to the ECP notification, the vacant seats also include two reserved for the majority party.
The general MPs de-notified include Murad Saeed, Omer Ayub Khan, Asad Qaiser, Pervaiz Khattak, Imran Khattak, Sheharyar Afridi, Ali Amin Khan, Noor ul-Haq Qadri, Raja Khurram Shahzad Nawaz, Ali Nawaz Awan, Asad Umer, Sadaqat Ali Khan, Ghulam Sardar Khan, Sheikh Rashid Shafique, Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed, Mansoor Hayat Khan, Fawad Chaudhry, Sanaullah Khan Mastikhel, Hammad Azhar, Shafqat Mehmood Khan, Malik Muhammad Amir Dogar, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Zartaj Gul, Faheem Khan, Saif ur-Rehman, Alamgir Khan, Syed Ali Haider, Aftab Hussain Shafique, Attaullah, Aftab Jehangir, Aslam Khan, Najeeb Haroon, and Qasim Khan Suri.
Aliya Hamza Malik and Kanwal Shauzab, who were elected on reserved seats for women from Punjab, were also denotified.
The de-notification of the lawmakers comes days after Khan said Prime Minister Sharif would be asked to take a vote of confidence from the House. With PTI dissident Raja Riaz Ahmad holding the parliamentary party leader’s position in the National Assembly, the party fears he may vote in favour of Sharif.
Raja Riaz leads the group of PTI MNAs who did not tender their resignations when the party decided to quit the assembly in the aftermath of Imran’s ouster.
In a meeting with media persons at his Zaman Park residence on Monday, Imran said planning and consultations with party leaders, as well as legal experts, were afoot to strategise how PTI’s turncoats can be stopped from siding with the ruling coalition of Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM).
Speaking to the media in Lahore earlier today, PTI’s Fawad Chaudhry said that the after the dissolution of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab assemblies, the party would focus on “sending the government home”.
He said that the PTI wanted to sit down with the federal government to work on an electoral framework. He noted that while Pakistan’s economic woes were substantial, they could be solved if political stability was brought.
“We want the federal government to sit with us for [formulating] an election framework. But in the current situation, the federal government is adamant on not holding elections.”
He said that the PTI had formed a committee headed by Pervaiz Khattak that would go to the NA speaker and ask for party members to be given the offices of leader of the opposition, parliamentary leader and chairman of the public accounts committee.
“We are hopeful that the plan for ousting the federal government will be completed in a few weeks.”
‘Attempt to run away from general polls’
Reacting to the development, Fawad “thanked” the speaker for accepting the resignations.
“But until you accept 70 more resignations, the posts of the NA opposition leader and the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee belong to the PTI,” he said.
PTI central information secretary Farrukh Habib alleged the NA speaker had accepted the resignations with “ill intent” because he found out that the PTI intended to remove Raja Riaz as the NA opposition leader.
PTI leader Hammad Azhar alleged that the Election Commission had “received orders from Avenfield”. “Another clumsy attempt to run away from general elections,” he said.
PTI’s Zulfi Bukhari said that the NA speaker had claimed he couldn’t accept the resignations collectively and each lawmaker had to verify their resignations individually.
“Imran Khan thinks of re-entering the National Assembly to seek a vote of no-confidence against Shehbaz Sharif. Within minutes there’s a mass acceptance,” he said.
The PTI had announced mass resignations from the National Assembly in April last year, a day after party chief Imran Khan’s ouster as the prime minister through a no-confidence vote and shortly before Shehbaz Sharif was elected as his successor.
National Assembly Speaker Raja Pervez Ashraf on July 28 last year accepted the resignations of only 11 PTI lawmakers who had resigned after the vote of no confidence against the former PM.
The PTI had first challenged the move in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on August 1, contesting that it was “unsustainable”. The IHC, however, had dismissed the petition on Sept 6.
The party then approached the Supreme Court, praying it to set aside the IHC order, terming it “vague, cursory, and against the law”. A decision on the PTI’s plea in the apex court is still pending.
Ashraf told a PTI delegation on Dec 29 that the party’s lawmakers would be summoned individually for verification of their resignations as the latter insisted on them being accepted in one go.
