Islamabad:
The Senator of the PML-N Irfan Siddiqui said that the government committee formed in December of last year to speak with the PTI of Imran Khan may not be dissolved. However, it has become non -functional for all practical purposes.
“The PTI after the unilateral withdrawal of the negotiation process also rejected the Prime Minister’s proposal,” Siddiqui wrote on the Micro-Blogging X website.
The chief of the PML-N who was the spokesman for the committee made this declaration one day after the speaker of the National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq said that the PML-N in power had not canceled his interviews with The PTI.
During an information interaction with journalists outside the Punjab Assembly on Friday, Sadiq said that the government had not closed the talks and that its negotiation team was still intact.
He said that the PTI negotiation team would take up the process once he has obtained an approval from his management. “The two parties are still in contact,” he added.
However, Irfan Siddiqui on Saturday did not hit an optimistic note on the talks that Sadiq had facilitated. According to Siddiqui, the opposition party was now “returned to his home of violent policy”. “However, if PTI feels the need for dialogue in the future, we would see,” he added.
The government and the PTI agreed to keep talks to end a political crisis in progress during a meeting between Sadiq and the PTI chief and former president of NA Asad Qaiser in December of last year.
During talks, the PTI demanded the training of judicial commissions to probe the incidents that occurred on May 9, 2023 and November 26, 2024.
However, during the last week of January, the PTI moved away unexpectedly from the table, connecting other sessions to the training of judicial commissions.
The collapse of negotiations follows a series of developments, in particular the Prime Minister’s appeal so that the PTI resumes dialogue through a parliamentary committee, which has met the resistance of the opposition. Instead, PTI dissolved its negotiation committee and converted it to a coordination committee aimed at forming a broader opposition alliance against the government.
Negotiations, which began on December 23, 2024, aimed to meet political and economic challenges, but collapsed after only three sessions. PTI requests were presented in the third round as a prerequisite for wider talks.
However, PTI 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”.
Meanwhile, under the direction of Khan, PTI is now working to unite other opposition parties to try to put pressure on the power coalition. Omar Ayub, head of opposition to the National Assembly, confirmed these efforts, declaring that PTI “actively pursued” alliances to challenge the government.
