PESHAWAR - In order to halt the provincial assembly’s dissolution, opposition parties in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa formally tabled a no-confidence move against Chief Minister Pervez Khattak in the PA secretariat Tuesday.
For this purpose, legislators of the opposition parties, JUI-F, PPP, PML-N, ANP and QWP, at a joint meeting, agreed on the no-confidence motion against the KP government and also submitted requisition for convening the assembly session.
Now after the no-confidence motion, the chief minister could not send advice for dissolution of the provincial assembly. Talking to media persons on the premises of the assembly, Opposition Leader Maulana Lutfur Rehman said some 48 members from the opposition benches had signed the no-confidence resolution.
“We did it just to stop the assembly dissolution in case the PTI makes an attempt to do so,” Maulana Lutfur Rehman explained. He said that JI, a coalition partner of PTI in the provincial government, had also assured them of supporting the no-confidence move.
Flanked by Sikandar Sherpao, Akbar Hayat Khan and others, he said the move came to stop the assembly dissolution in case the PTI which is the largest party with 55 seats in the house of 124 makes an attempt to do so. Lutfur Rehman said they would not allow anyone to derail democracy.
In the house of 124 members, 63 members are required to make the no-confidence move a success. The PTI’s strength, including coalition partners, is 68 against 54 of the opposition parties.
Meanwhile, the opposition parties also contacted JI and AJI, coalition partners of the PTI-led government, and asked for their support.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Pervez Khattak, while talking to media persons in Islamabad, said he was not worried as the PTI had required strength in the provincial assembly.
PML-N lawmaker Aurangzeb Nalota said, “We oppose dissolution of the provincial assembly and want to save it constitutionally and lawfully.”
Talking to media persons, ANP Parliamentary Leader Sardar Hussain Babak said the requisition had been moved solely to stop the chief minister from dissolving the provincial assembly.
He said they had nothing to do with PTI legislators’ resignations from the provincial assembly. “We took the step to stop dissolution of the provincial assembly,” Babak added.
While commenting on the move by the opposition parties, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information Minister Mushtaq Ghani said the opposition parties lacked the required strength and the coalition partners supported the PTI.
The motion has been forwarded to Speaker Asad Qaiser and Governor Sardar Mahtab Ahmed Khan to convene a session. At present, in the house of 124 members, PTI has 56 seats, JI eight, AJI five, PML-N 17, JUI-F 16, PPP and ANP five each and QWP has 10 seats. By-election is still to be held for a DI Khan seat.
The PTI government in KP was formed through a coalition with JI and AWI with a total of 69 seats. If the JI quits the coalition and joins the opposition, the PTI-led coalition will be left with 61 seats and the opposition parties’ strength will reach 62, one more than the government’s.
With the prevailing position, the government needs 62 votes to save its chief minister while the opposition also needs the same number of MPAs to save the assembly.
It is worth mentioning here that 15 PTI lawmakers who have reportedly serious differences with the chief minister may join the opposition, but still there is no such move in sight.
The move to table the no-confidence move came a day after the PTI parliamentarians from the National Assembly, Sindh and Balochistan assemblies handed over their resignations to party chief Chief Imran Khan. A day earlier, JI, the main coalition party in the provincial government, vowed to foil any move to dissolve the provincial assembly.