ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman, Imran Khan, has once again decided to contest by-elections in all 33 National Assembly seats which fell vacant after the National Assembly speaker accepted resignations of the party’s 35 lawmakers.
A day ago, the NA Speaker, Raja Pervez Ashraf, accepted the resignations of 35 PTI lawmakers which also included two women MNAs elected against seats reserved for women, who had resigned from their seats in April last year following the ouster of former PM Imran Khan.
“Tehreek-e-Insaf will contest elections on all the seats and Imran Khan will be the candidate of Tehreek-e-Insaf on these thirty-three seats,” tweeted PTI leader Fawad Chaudhry.
In October last year, Imran Khan won seven National Assembly seats for the PTI in a by-election that was seen as a direct contest between the former ruling party and the current ruling coalition, which also grabbed two seats.
One hundred and twenty-three PTI MNAs had resigned en masse on April 11 last year two days after party chairman Imran Khan was ousted as prime minister through a no-confidence motion.
However, on April 17, the newly-elected NA Speaker Ashraf directed the assembly secretariat to deal with the resignations of the PTI lawmakers afresh and present them before him so that they could be treated as per law.
Last year in June, the ruling coalition had formulated a strategy on the matter of en masse resignations of the PTI lawmakers from the assembly and agreed to proceed with phase-wise acceptance, following which, the NA speaker proceeded to accept 11 of the 123 resignations.
Murad Saeed, Omar Ayub Khan, Asad Umar, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Hammad Azhar, Shafqat Mehmood, Asad Qaiser, and Ali Zaidi are among the PTI bigwigs who have been de-notified by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) after the speaker accepted their resignations.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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