EDITORIAL: Will Pervaiz Elahi dissolve the Punjab Assembly on Friday in accordance with Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan’s decision? Will he get the vote of confidence of the majority in the Punjab Assembly as asked by Governor Balighur Rehman and stay on? Or, will he fail to have the confidence of the majority of members of the assembly and go home? The answers to these questions will be at hand by Friday, the day on which Imran Khan wants the chief ministers of Punjab and KPK to dissolve the assemblies.
As to what these answers will be, there is a variety of opinions by the informed and not so informed because the Constitution doesn’t go into detail in the relevant Article 130 that deals with the subject of cabinet of a province. The answer to the first question is not yet available and may be so before the deadline.
Round-the-clock make-and-break consultation processes at the levels of the higher leadership of the involved sides are yet to arrive at some definitive answers, but early indications suggest that something in concrete terms would be there before Friday.
The kingpin in that process appears to be PML (Q) President Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. In the 370-member Punjab Assembly, his party has only 10 members but in there it is not the number but the weight that counts as whosoever wins over these 10 members he or she will become the chief minister of Punjab, as is Pervaiz Elahi now.
According to some reports, the intermediaries have succeeded in bridging over the perceptional differences between the Chaudhry brothers. Should that be the case, it is quite likely that Pervaiz Elahi will not dissolve the Punjab Assembly and win over the PDM support to remain in office.
As for the second question which seeks viability of the governor’s letter asking the chief minister to obtain a vote of confidence in a special sitting of the assembly on Wednesday, it is possibly a double-edged move.
If he fails to get the vote of confidence, he would lose the power to dissolve the assembly. And if he gets the vote of confidence he would still not be able to dissolve the assembly on Friday because a notice of ‘No-Confidence’ has already been submitted and a chief minister facing such motion is effectively barred by the constitution to dissolve the assembly. And there are also quite a few hiccups confronting this move. There is a time limit on this.
It must be acted upon ‘not before three days and not after seven days’, which means the dissolutions ‘D-day’ of December 23 falls within the period the chief minister must be working to get vote of confidence and therefore cannot dissolve the assembly. But if he refrains from obtaining vote of confidence from the assembly it shall be deemed that he does not command confidence of the house any longer.
The third question that seeks an answer is what would Elahi’s fate if he loses the vote of confidence. Yes, he will be no more chief minister but shall remain member of the assembly, which will stay even if the incumbent chief minister fails to survive the vote of no-confidence against him.
However, it is interesting to note that the political situation gets murkier and more tangled, but the suspense never slackens.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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