PML-N senator Irfan Siddiqui has said that the state committee, which was set up last December to hold conversations with Imran Khan’s PTI, may not be dissolved. However, it has become non-functional for all practical purposes.

“PTI after unilateral withdrawal from the negotiation process has also rejected the Prime Minister’s proposal,” Siddiqui wrote on Saturday at Microblogging-site X.

The PML-N leader, who served as spokesman for the committee, made this statement a day after speaking the National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq said the ruling PML-N has not interrupted his conversations with PTI.

During an information interaction with journalists outside the Punjab assembly on Friday, Sadiq said the government has not closed the door on conversations and that its negotiating team is still intact.

He claimed that the PTI negotiation team would resume the process when it was approved by its management. “The two parties are still in contact,” he added.

However, on Saturday, Irfan Siddiqui did not beat an optimistic note about the conversations that Sadiq had facilitated. According to Siddiqui, the opposition party had now “returned to its home ground for violent politics”. “But if PTI feels the need for dialogue in the future, we would see,” he added.

The government and PTI agreed to hold conversations to put an end to a continuous political crisis at a meeting between Sadiq and PTI leader and former NA speaker Asad Qaiser last December.

During the negotiations, PTI required the formation of legal commissions to investigate the incidents that happened on May 9, 2023 and November 26, 2024.

In the last week of January, however, PTI unexpectedly went away from the table and linked further meetings with the formation of legal commissions.

The collapse of the negotiations follows a number of developments, including the Prime Minister’s call to PTI to resume dialogue through a parliamentary committee met with opposition from the opposition. Instead, PTI dissolved his negotiating committee and converted it to a coordination committee aimed at forming a broader opposition alliance against the government.

The negotiations, which began on December 23, 2024, aimed to tackle political and economic challenges, but collapsed after only three meetings. PTI’s requirements were presented in the third round as a prerequisite for broader lectures.

However, PTI interrupted the negotiations within a week and claimed that the government had not fulfilled its conditions to constitute legal commissions within seven days. The government, on the other hand, accused PTI too early to go away from the process without awaiting a formal answer “within seven working days”.

Meanwhile, PTI is working under Khan’s direction now to unite other opposition parties in an attempt to mount pressure on the prevailing coalition. Omar Ayub, opposition leader in the National Assembly, confirmed these efforts and said PTI “actively pursues” alliances to challenge the government.