The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Wednesday de-notified another 43 lawmakers of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in the National Assembly, a day after Speaker Raja Pervez Ashraf approved their resignations from the lower house.
On Tuesday, reports emerged that Ashraf had approved the resignations last week—on Jan. 22—but the summary for their de-notification was pending resolution by the ECP. In the past week, the speaker has approved the resignations of 113 lawmakers from the National Assembly—all except one from the PTI—after months of claiming he could not do so without individually verifying their notices. As a consequence, the only members of the PTI remaining in the Lower House are dissident lawmakers and two MNAs who had submitted leave applications instead of resignations.
The PTI was swift to condemn the latest round of acceptance of resignations, as the lawmakers had a day earlier announced they would withdraw their resignations and return to Parliament to assume the slots of opposition leader, Public Accounts Committee chairman, and parliamentary leader. However, per the NA, the resignations had already been processed prior to this.
In a posting on Twitter, senior PTI leader Fawad Chaudhry claimed his party’s primary reason for reversing course on its decision to quit the National Assembly in April 2022 was to remove Raja Riaz as the opposition leader. “Right now, Shehbaz Sharif has lost the support of 172 members and is relying on lotas (turncoats) to save his government,” he claimed, adding the acceptance of resignations had left 40 percent of the National Assembly’s seats empty and there was no justification for delaying general elections.
PTI lawmakers resigned en masse from the National Assembly on the instructions of party chief Imran Khan after he was ousted in a vote of no-confidence in April 2022. The PTI had initially claimed all the resignations were accepted by then-deputy speaker Qasim Suri but Ashraf rejected this and said he would individually verify all the resignations. In July, he approved the resignations of 11 PTI lawmakers in July 2022, but had stalled the process for the remainder until this month, when he first accepted the resignations of 34 PTI MNAs and Awami Muslim League chief Sheikh Rashid Ahmed. This was followed by the acceptance of another 35 resignations and finally the 43 resignations accepted this week.