Politics has its own strange justice. Sometimes a party does not lose power because its opponents defeat it. It loses power because it starts defeating itself.
The latest controversy over PTI’s resignations from parliamentary standing committees is one such moment. On the surface, it is being presented as another heroic act of resistance. But beneath this loud vocabulary lies a quieter and more damaging reality. The opposition has walked away from the very forums where serious parliamentary work is done.
Federal Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Dr Tariq Fazal Chaudhry has put forward a blunt explanation. According to him, PTI’s boycott of standing committees is not rooted in ideology but in internal party disputes, especially over the chairmanship of committees and, more specifically, the Public Accounts Committee under Junaid Akbar Khan. His claim may be political, but it cannot be dismissed easily because it fits into a wider pattern now visible inside PTI. Before the boycott, Tariq Fazal says, opposition members were not passive spectators. They examined budget matters carefully. They participated in committee discussions. Their input was taken seriously by the government. He even sat on a podcast and praised young parliamentarians such as Usama Mela and Mubeen Arif for constructive work in committees.
PTI cannot claim parliamentary space and abandon the very forums where parliamentary power is exercised.
In reality, Pakistan’s parliamentary system does not run on speeches alone. The real work takes place in committees. Budgets are scrutinised there. Ministries are questioned there. Legislation is examined there. Amendments are negotiated there. Files are opened there. Bureaucrats appear there. If an opposition party abandons these forums, it does not punish the government as much as it disarms itself.
This is exactly the point some PTI insiders are now making. There is concern that PTI is sitting in the National Assembly and Senate but is absent from committees where legislative work actually happens.
The bigger issue is that PTI has leaders, but too many centres of command. PTI insiders now speak of multiple power centres: the current central leadership, Imran Khan’s family, the parliamentary party, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government and overseas social media activists. Each claims loyalty to Imran Khan. Each claims to speak for the struggle. Yet the result is confusion rather than coherence.
PTI has never fully resolved its contradiction between street politics and parliamentary politics. It wants the legitimacy of parliament without the patience of parliamentary work. It wants seats, salaries and speeches. It tells supporters that the system is illegitimate, yet uses the same system to claim representation.
No party can ride two horses forever.
There is another irony. PTI often complains, not without reason, that its political space has been squeezed. But when limited space exists inside parliament, why surrender it voluntarily? If committees provide even a narrow window to question the government, expose bad policy, amend legislation and record dissent, why shut that window with one’s own hands?
This does not absolve the government. The treasury benches should not use PTI’s confusion as an excuse to bulldoze legislation or turn committees into rubber stamps.
But PTI too must decide what it wants. If Imran Khan is its ideology, as its leaders say, then that ideology needs political instruments, not just emotional declarations. A party cannot build pressure only through hashtags. It cannot substitute overseas social media campaigns for legislative preparation. It cannot keep telling its voters that every retreat is a strategy and every internal dispute is a sacrifice.
The budget process should have been PTI’s opportunity. Pakistan’s economy is under severe pressure. Inflation, taxation, energy prices, IMF conditions, development cuts, provincial shares and public-sector waste all needed forensic opposition scrutiny. A serious opposition would have used every committee room to expose every weakness in the budget. Instead, PTI has allowed the government to say that the opposition has detached itself from the budget process.
PTI’s supporters deserve more than symbolism. They deserve a party that can resist and legislate, protest and negotiate, criticise and amend. Walking out is sometimes necessary in politics. Walking away from every forum is not strategy. It is self-isolation.
The writer is a freelance columnist.