Pakistan Muslim League-N leader Khawaja Asif on Tuesday said the party might quit the National Assembly in two months to force the government to hold fresh general elections in the country. "The present National Assembly has become dysfunctional and useless, therefore it would be an exercise in futility to remain sitting in the Assembly that has failed to solve any problems confronting the nation," Asif said in an interview to a private TV channel on Tuesday.
PML-N with 90 seats in the National Assembly is the second largest party. It is the main opposition party in the 340-seat House. He said that his party had been mulling over resigning from the Parliament for almost two years as coalition government had failed to deliver. "Even the former foreign minister and PPP stalwart Shah Mahmood Qureshi has admitted that Parliament has become ineffective and called for fresh polls in the country," he added.
Shah Mahmood Qureshi resigned from both his party and the National Assembly membership on Monday and called upon the other political parties to resign from the assemblies as time had come to hold fresh general elections. Addressing a new conference Qureshi said on Tuesday that he would meet PML-N Chief Nawaz Sharif shortly to discuss the political situation and future course of action to oust the PPP led government.
Political observers said that Qureshi would ask Sharif that PML-N should resign from the assemblies making it impossible for PPP-led coalition government to hold the mid-term Senate elections in March.
As the political environment is boiling up in Punjab after Imran Khan's 30th October mammoth public meeting in Lahore, another PML-N stalwart Kh. Saad Rafique has said that the opposition parties will not change the government through a no-confidence vote in the national assembly but by the street force and agitation.
Talking to this scribe, Head of Political Department at LUMS Dr Rasul Bakhsh Rias said that the present political situation is fluid and there might be some change before March 2012 provided PML-N and some members of PML-Q and PPP resign from the assemblies making it impossible for the government to hold by-elections on a large scale. Dr Rais said since both PPP and PML-N have failed to deliver due to bad governance and corruption, people are now looking towards PTI chief Imran Khan and his team to get the country out of the woods through fair and free elections.