After hiatus: Governor summons assembly session on Oct 23

PESHAWAR:

The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Assembly will finally be in session next week after a break of nearly four months. According to an official statement, Governor Sardar Mehtab Khan Abbasi has summoned the session on October 23 at 3pm.

This will be the first assembly proceeding following the conclusion of the budget debate on June 26 and is likely to be a fiery one as the opposition is poised to take up a no-confidence motion against Chief Minister Pervez Khattak which was submitted at the Assembly Secretariat on August 19 and is still pending.



To avert facing a tough time in the house, the two main coalition partners Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf on Wednesday decided to form a jirga of the government’s allies in order to persuade opposition parties to withdraw their no-confidence motion against Khattak.

The decision was made at a meeting between MPA and JI chief Sirjaul Haq and Speaker Asad Qaiser. The jirga, headed by Qaiser, will try to persuade K-P’s joint opposition to withdraw the motion before the assembly session begins.

The joint opposition, however, will decide its course of action about the upcoming session in the next few days.

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) parliamentary leader in the assembly Sardar Aurangzeb Nalotha told The Express Tribune the opposition parties discussed the issue on Thursday with opposition leader Lutfur Rehman.

According to Nalotha, they have decided that parties of the joint opposition will not meet the government’s jirga on a single-party basis. Instead, they will strive to arrive at a unanimous decision about the motion. “All opposition parties are united and our decision will also reflect this,” said Nalotha.

Awami National Party (ANP) parliamentary leader Sardar Hussain Babak told The Express Tribune the opposition parties were consulting each other on the matter. However, Babak insisted the no-trust motion against CM Khattak was not aimed at toppling the government but to save the house from the threat of dissolution.

“The government should not doubt the opposition’s intentions, the motion was solely aimed at pre-empting a possible dissolution of the provincial legislature,” said Babak.

He added the jirga had not contacted the opposition leadership as yet. However, the ANP leader hinted that the motion could be withdrawn if all parties agreed to it.

“We will arrange a meeting of opposition parliamentary leaders and in case of an agreement, we may withdraw the no-trust motion,” said Babak.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2014.