Fawad Chaudhry has asked Governor Baleegh-ur-Rehman on Friday to dissolve the Punjab Assembly right away rather than waiting for the 48-hour window to elapse.
Outside of former prime minister Imran Khan’s Zaman Park mansion in Lahore he told the reporters, “We ask the governor to not wait 48 hours and to sign the summary now.”
Remarks were made the day after Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervez Elahi officially urged the governor to dissolve the provincial assembly. This came hours after Elahi regained the trust of the majority of MPs in PA.
The decision to dissolve the parliament brought to an end weeks of rumors, legal fighting, and a public display of the disagreements between Punjab’s ruling coalition partners, the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) and PTI.
During today’s media conference, Fawad stated that Hamza Shahbaz, the leader of the opposition had been contacted to start talks on the caretaker setup and that Elahi would be sending him a list of potential candidates.
He said, “We hope he (Elahi) gives the names of those who can conduct free and fair elections.” Mahmood Khan, the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and his cabinet were supposed to meet the PTI chairman but they were unable to do so because of the severe weather,” Fawad said.
We had a phone conversation with them, he stated. The suggestion to dissolve the KP parliament has been drafted, they have said. The coalition administration in power was criticized by him for “hiding their faces from the public.”
Governor Baleegh-ur-Rehman has stated that the procedure for dissolving the assembly will take place step by step and has described it as a “lengthy process.”
He stated during a ceremony in Lahore that elections will unavoidably take place 90 days after the assembly was dissolved, but he added that it would be Ramazan at that time.
We won’t have enough time for preparations if we schedule the by-polls earlier, he claimed. He continued by saying that in order to put up a caretaker government, the opposition leader in the Punjab Assembly would need to be consulted, and he stressed that this procedure “takes time.”
