Islamabad:
The National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq again invited the opposition to sit across the table with the ruling alliance and secure the resistance of his full cooperation to hold negotiations with the government and confirm his role as “the house’s parliament for parliament.”
The NA speaker repeated his offer months after the government speaker failed, saying that dialogue was the only way to solve political differences. The speaker said he would act as a bridge between the two sides to achieve this goal.
Sadiq expanded the invitation during a session with the National Assembly as the opposition member and the former speaker Asad Qaiser raised a matter of the opposition’s privileges.
He said that the constitution, the law, parliamentary traditions and rules were the same for everyone, and their compliance was important to strengthen democracy. However, an official statement from the NA Secretariat said that despite his offer, the opposition staged a walkout and left the house.
With reference to the arrest of Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, Sadiq noted that even in this case no “production orders” were issued. He emphasized that no forum was larger than the National Assembly and the Senate as a “Grand Jirga” and urged all political forces to emerge to strengthen parliament.
Earlier, the negotiations between the two sides that began on December 23, 2024, with the aim of tackling political and economic challenges, had collapsed after only three meetings. PTI’s requirements were presented in the third round as a prerequisite for broader lectures.
However, PTI had interrupted negotiations within a week and claimed that the government did not meet its conditions to constitute legal commissions within seven days. The government, on the other hand, had accused PTI premature to go away from the process without awaiting a formal answer “within seven working days”.
Later, the PML-N-led reigning coalition had formally completed its negotiations with the opposition PTI after the opposition party rejected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s offer of resumption of conversations to run long-term questions between the two pages.
The government had officially closed the door to negotiations with PTI following the sudden withdrawal of the opposition party from the dialogue process and further attached meetings with the formation of legal commissions to probe 9 May 2023 and November 26, 2024, events.
The confirmation had come from Senator Irfan Siddiqui, the spokesman for the Government’s Negotiating Committee, who expressed regret over PTI’s decision and emphasized that conversations could have given an opportunity to run thorny questions PTI had continued the process.
Senator Siddiqui had said that PTI specifically took names of PTI founder Imran Khan and other leaders, including Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Omar Chemema, Ijaz Chaudhry, Yasmin Rashid and Mahmood Rashid, and demanded their release, saying that PTI did not write these name in its charter, but it said they their release.
