Islamabad:
The president of the National Assembly Ayaz Sadiq once again invited the opposition to sit through the table with the alliance to power, ensuring the opposition of his full cooperation in the holding of negotiations with the government and reaffirming his role as “goalkeeper of the chamber”.
The speaker Na reiterated his offer for months after the failure of government opposition talks, saying that dialogue was the only way to resolve political differences. The speaker said he would act as a bridge between the two parties to achieve this goal.
Sadiq extended the invitation during a session of the National Assembly when the opposition member and former president Asad Qaiser raised a case concerning the privileges of the opposition.
He declared that the Constitution, the Law, the Parliamentary Traditions and the Rules were equal for everyone and that their membership was essential to strengthen democracy. An official statement by the NA secretariat, however, said that despite its offer, the opposition organized a debrifying and left the house.
Referring to the arrest of the head of the Indian opposition Rahul Gandhi, Sadiq noted that even in this case, no “production orders” has been issued. He pointed out that no forum was more than the National Assembly and the Senate as “Grand Jirga” and urged all the political forces to manifest itself to strengthen Parliament.
Previously, the negotiations between the two parties, which began on December 23, 2024, aimed to meet political and economic challenges, had collapsed after only three sessions. PTI requests were presented in the third round as a prerequisite for wider talks.
However, PTI had canceled the negotiations within one week, claiming that the government had not fulfilled its conditions of judicial commissions formed within seven days. The government, on the other hand, accused PTI of moving away prematurely from the process without waiting for an official response “within seven working days”.
Later, the leader coalition led by PML-N officially put an end to its negotiations with the opposition PTI after the opposition party rejected the offer of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to use the talks to solve long-standing problems between the two parties.
The government had officially closed the door to negotiations with PTI following the brutal withdrawal of the opposition party of the dialogue process and linking other sessions to the training of judicial commissions to probe on May 9, 2023 and November 26, 2024.
The confirmation had come from Senator Irfan Siddiqui, spokesperson for the government’s negotiation committee, expressing regrets with regard to PTI’s decision and stressing that the talks could have given the possibility of resolving thorny questions if PTI had continued the process.
Senator Siddiqui had declared that PTI had specifically taken the names of the founder of PTI Imran Khan and other leaders, including Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Omar Cheema, Ijaz Chaudhry, Yasmin Rashid and Mahmood Rashid, and asked that their government should not write these names in its charter but said that the government should facilitate their release.
