Islamabad:
The PML-N senator, Irfan Siddiqui, said the government committee formed in December last year to hold conversations with the Imran Khan PTI may not be dissolved. However, it has become non -functional for all practical purposes.
“The PTI after unilaterally withdrawing from the negotiation process has also rejected the Prime Minister’s proposal,” Siddiqui wrote on Saturday at the Microblogging X site.
The PML-N leader who served as a spokesman for the committee made this statement one day after the president’s National Assembly, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, said that the ruler PML-N has not canceled his conversations with the PTI.
During an information interaction with journalists outside the Punjab Assembly on Friday, Sadiq said the government has not closed the door to conversations and that its negotiation team is still intact.
He affirmed that the PTI negotiation team would resume the process once he obtained an approval of his leadership. “The two parties are still in touch,” he added.
However, Irfan Siddiqui on Saturday did not achieve an optimistic note about the conversations that Sadiq had been facilitating. According to Siddiqui, the opposition party had now “returned to his home of violent politics.” “However, if the PTI feels the need for dialogue in the future, then we would see,” he added.
The Government and the PTI agreed to hold conversations to end an ongoing political crisis in a meeting between SADIQ and the leader of PTI and the former president of Na Asad Qaiser in December last year.
During the conversations, the PTI demanded the formation of judicial commissions to investigate the incidents that occurred on May 9, 2023 and November 26, 2024.
However, in the last week of January, the PTI unexpectedly moved away from the table, linking new sessions with the formation of judicial commissions.
The collapse of the negotiations follows a series of developments, including the call of the prime minister so that PTI resume the dialogue through a parliamentary committee, which met the resistance of the opposition. Instead, PTI dissolved its negotiation committee and made it a coordination committee aimed at forming a broader opposition alliance against the Government.
The negotiations, which began on December 23, 2024, aimed to address political and economic challenges, but collapsed after only three sessions. PTI’s demands were presented in the third round as a previous requirement for broader conversations.
However, PTI suspended the negotiations within a week, claiming that the Government had not fulfilled its conditions of constitution of judicial commissions within seven days. The Government, on the other hand, accused PTI to move away prematurely from the process without waiting for a formal response “within seven business days.”
Meanwhile, under the direction of Khan, PTI is now working to unite other opposition parties in an attempt to assemble pressure on the ruling coalition. Omar Ayub, leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, confirmed these efforts, stating that PTI was “actively chasing” alliances to challenge the government.
