LAHORE: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf senior leader Fawad Chaudhry has said a dialogue between the government and the opposition is necessary to end uncertainty in the country following the backdoor channel talks.

The PTI leader, however, kept sticking to the party chairman’s stance that the government should first announce holding early polls. “The government should announce holding early elections and we are ready to go into talks to work out the election date and framework,” he said while speaking to media persons outside Imran Khan’s Zaman Park residence here on Sunday.

Mr Chaudhry demanded the National Assembly Speaker Raja Pervaiz Ashraf should immediately accept the (already submitted) resignations of the PTI’s 123 MNAs to make way for holding of the national and provincial assemblies elections, simultaneously.

As soon as the PTI wrote a letter to the NA speaker for acceptance of the resignations, the former federal information minister said, Mr Ashraf wound up the assembly session and “slipped away”. “We will go to the National Assembly on Wednesday or Thursday to catch the speaker and ask him to accept the resignations,” he added.

Responding to a question, Mr Chaudhry said, “The PTI will not delay the dissolution of the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assemblies and their [opposition’s] fate be sealed on Dec 23 (Friday) as announced by the party chairman”.

Expecting that “sane elements” in the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) would advise [the premier] that the National Assembly should be dissolved, he said for the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) it should be easy to hold general elections instead of conducting the exercise in 70 per cent of the country, where seats would go vacant.

He asked the government to “respect thepublic opinion” and take the nation on the path to general elections.

Answering a question about the proposed no-confidence motion against the chief minister or call for fresh vote of confidence, Mr Chaudhry said as the PTI-PMLQ coalition had 188 MPAs, the opposition would face humiliation in both cases.

He said the Zaradri family had ruined Bhutto’s PPP and would not even find candidates to field in Punjab and KP and added that the PML-N too would face the same fate, if it tried to delay the general, or even partly, elections in 70pc of the country.

Saying the country was already in a severe economic crisis and facing the worst brain-drain, he warned that such a situation, if persisted, would convert Pakistan into an Afghanistan-like state.

The PTI leader also chided the Islamabad High Court’s conflicting decisions in the cases of Senator Azam Swati and PML-N’s Javed Latif, and Marriam Aurangzeb and PTV officials, on the same day over its own jurisdiction’s explanation, urging Supreme Court to take notice of the situation.

Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2022