Sardar Ayaz SadiqNational Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq on Tuesday postponed the fourth round of negotiations between the government and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) due to absence of the opposition party representatives.
Earlier, the speaker reached out to PTI leaders Omar Ayub and Asad Qaiser over telephone, inviting them to participate in the negotiations.
However, Omar Ayub declined the invitation, stating that negotiations could not proceed until a judicial commission was formed.
The NA speaker briefly spoke and said the government believed in dialogue and expected that the PTI representatives would join them to carry the talks forward. He said political matters should be solved through dialogues and there were no preconditions in such matters.
He said the government side expected that the PTI would reconsider its move and join the dialogue process therefore, it was not disbanding the committee for now.
Sadiq said his doors remained open and expressed hopes that the opposition would hold talks to find a way forward.
Separately, PML-N Senator Irfan Siddiqui said on Tuesday that the negotiation process with the PTI was “practically” at an end after the opposition party skipped today’s fourth round of meetings.
Talks between the government and the PTI commenced in the last week of December to bring down political temperatures, but despite weeks of negotiations, the dialogue process stalled on major issues – the formation of two judicial commissions and the release of PTI prisoners.
Speaking to the media outside Parliament House, Siddiqui said: “Since they (PTI) didn’t come, the negotiation process has practically ended. However, our [negotiating] committee is still there and it has not been dissolved.”
He continued, “If they can approach the speaker by their deadline of January 31 or they think this door should be opened again and this process should resume then they can contact the speaker and our committee will still sit down and talk to them before the 31st or even after that date we can continue this process.”
He added that PTI must have other priorities, saying: “The process that they started, they themselves have now finished by sabotaging the process.”
Siddiqui added that the government “took this process forward with a lot of patience as the other side called for civil disobedience … and did very scary tweets that included attacks on the armed forces, the prime minister was abused but we tolerated that”, adding that the onus was on the other side now to approach the speaker to restart the process.
He added that three committee meetings took place and after 42 days PTI gave their demands, saying “We only asked for seven working days and did comprehensive work during those days, we did two to three meetings, called lawyers and impartial legal experts to understand how much space can be given to them according to their demands – we tried for that.”
“We remained focused on our final answer that we won’t share publicly since it had been decided that it was a committee-to-committee matter and they didn’t come,” Siddiqui said, adding that PTI could have shared what their disagreements were in the meeting.