Senior PTI leader and Senator Shibli Faraz has stated that lawmakers would not go to the Parliament House, and instead, the PTI would approach the Supreme Court (SC) to seek acceptance of the mass resignations. “We had decided to go to the assembly for acceptance of our resignations. But this is not the way and MNAs, who are elected by the people, cannot be asked to keep standing in a queue for acceptance of their resignations. The government is doing all this handling the resignation issue with a mala fide intention,” said Mr Faraz, alleging that the speaker wanted to “humiliate” the PTI lawmakers by treating them as “charity seekers”. Talking to a private news channel, Faraz said they would approach the Supreme Court and ask it to direct the speaker to accept the resignations submitted some eight months ago. “We will go to the SC in a day or two,” he said.

The party is going to the apex court where this issue has already been discussed during the hearing of various petitions and even the judges had observed that PTI should reconsider its decision of quitting the assembly. When asked if it was not a U-turn as PTI Vice Chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi had written a letter to the speaker only six days back, asking him to allocate some time for the party’s MNAs to verify their resignations, Mr Faraz said they wanted to do so, but the government did not seem to be serious which was evident from the fact that it had convened a session of the National Assembly onThursday (today) on a one-day notice despite the fact that the speaker was not even present in the country. On Dec 15, while talking to reporters in Lahore, Mr Qureshi had expressed his party’s resolve to dissolve the assemblies of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and get the MNAs’ resignations accepted after appearing before the speaker. “We have already made our decision. We will execute it,” he had stated, adding that party Chairman Imran Khan had given him the letter for sending it to the speaker.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan-INP