Malik Waqar
PML-N Senator Irfan Siddiqui has said the governmental committee formed in December last year to hold talks with Imran Khan’s PTI might 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 on micro-blogging site X.
The PML-N leader who served as the spokesperson of the committee made this statement a day after Speaker National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq said the ruling PML-N has not called off its talks with the PTI.
During an information interaction with journalists outside the Punjab Assembly on Friday, Sadiq said the government has not closed the door on talks and that its negotiation team is still intact.
He claimed that the PTI negotiation team would resume the process once it got an approval from its leadership. “The two parties are still in touch,” he added.
However, Irfan Siddiqui on Saturday did not strike an optimistic note about the talks that Sadiq had been facilitating. According to Siddiqui, the opposition party had now “returned to its home ground of violent politics”. “However, if the PTI feels the need for dialogue in future then we would see,” he added.
The government and the PTI agreed to hold talks to bring an end to an ongoing political crisis in a meeting between Sadiq and PTI leader and former NA speaker Asad Qaiser in December last year.
During the talks, the PTI demanded formation of judicial commissions to probe the incidents that transpired on May 9, 2023 and November 26, 2024.
However, in the last week of January, the PTI unexpectedly walked away from the table, linking further sittings with the formation of judicial commissions.
The collapse of negotiations follows a series of developments, including the prime minister’s call for PTI to resume dialogue through a parliamentary committee, which was met with resistance from the opposition. Instead, PTI dissolved its negotiation committee and converted it into 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 just three sittings. PTI’s demands were presented in the third round as a prerequisite for broader talks.
However, PTI called off negotiations within a week, claiming the government had failed to meet its conditions of constituting judicial commissions within seven days. The government, on the other hand, accused PTI of prematurely walking away from the process without awaiting a formal response “within seven working days”.
Meanwhile, under Khan’s direction, PTI is now working to unite other opposition parties in an attempt to mount pressure on the ruling coalition. Omar Ayub, Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly, confirmed these efforts, stating that PTI was “actively pursuing” alliances to challenge the government.
