All PTI lawmakers to resign from National Assembly on Monday, say former ministers

Tariq Butt, Correspondent

Senior Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) leader and former information minister Fawad Chaudhry has announced that his party would resign en masse from the National Assembly on Monday, a day after former prime minister Imran Khan lost his government via a successful no-confidence move.

However, two former ministers Ali Muhammad Khan and Shah Mahmood Qureshi said that the PTI MPs should not resign. Other party officials said that the opinion was split about leaving the National Assembly (NA).

The decision to resign, Chaudhry said, was tied up with the acceptance of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Shahbaz Sharif's nomination papers for prime minister's elections, to which the PTI had raised objections. In a later development, the National Assembly Secretariat rejected the objections and accepted Shehbaz's nomination.

Talking to the media in with a host of other PTI leaders and officials, Chaudhry said a meeting of the PTI's central core executive committee (CEC) was held in Banigala with Imran Khan where "the whole situation was analysed".

He said the CEC recommended to Khan that the PTI should resign from the assemblies starting with the National Assembly. "If our objections on Sharif's [nomination] papers are not addressed then we will resign tomorrow," he said.

Earlier, former interior minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed also announced that all PTI members will resign from the National Assembly, the media reported.

Sheikh Rasheed, in a statement, said that they cannot sit in the National Assembly with thieves and looters of the national exchequer, Dunya News reported.

Elaborating on the PTI's decision to nominate its Vice Chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi for the prime minister's position after a successful vote of no-confidence against Khan, Chaudhry said that contesting the election offered the party a way to challenge Shehbaz Sharif's nomination papers.

He said it was a "great injustice" that Sharif would be contesting the election for the prime minister on the same day he is to be indicted in a money laundering case.

"What can be more insulting for Pakistan that a foreign selected and foreign imported government is imposed on it and a person like Shehbaz is made its head," he rued.

Referring to the situation around the successful no-trust vote, Chaudhry said that there were no "two opinions" in the PTI's CEC meeting that it was anything other than a "very big conspiracy".

"It was a foreign regime change operation that happened here," he said. "We think this is a slap on the face of the people of Pakistan. We reject it. The whole nation expects leadership from Imran Khan and expects from PTI that they'll come out on streets [against] this foreign conspiracy."