CT Newsroom
The government negotiation committee has decided to give one more chance to the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) to rejoin the dialogue process.
Reportedly, on Tuesday, the opposition party did not come for the fourth round of talks with the government. During this round, the government had promised to share its response to its charter of demands.
The spokesperson for the government negotiation team, Senator Irfan Siddiqui said that committee has decided to give one more chance to PTI and they will wait until the end of the month.
“Following the meeting of the committee, which was skipped by the PTI, we (the government) sat together and decided… we will wait till Jan 31, the deadline given by the PTI for the fulfilment of their demand”, the senator said.
He said the talks were almost over after the opposition party skipped the fourth round. He added that they would now ask the prime minister to dissolve the committee since he had created it for the negotiations.
When asked if the government had shared its response in the meeting, the PML-N senator said that PTI would have been satisfied if they had attended on Tuesday. He mentioned that the government’s response was very close to meeting PTI’s demands. “The government could have been even more flexible if PTI had not walked away from the talks,” he added.
“If they can approach the speaker by their deadline of January 31 or if they think this door should be opened again…then they can contact the speaker and our committee will still sit down and talk to them before the 31st, or even after that date we can continue this process,” he added.
Senator Siddiqui said the government “took this process forward with a lot of patience”.
“We won’t share publicly since it had been decided that this was a committee-to-committee matter and they (PTI) didn’t join,” he replied to a question about the government’s response to the PTI demands
Meanwhile, NA speaker Ayaz Sadiq said , “My doors remain open. I again express hopes for the government and the opposition to hold talks to find a way forward,” he said, adding, “In negotiations, you don’t put forward conditions first — you sit (for talks) and negotiate, where decisions are made on what is accepted and what isn’t, whether there is an alternate proposal.”
“The committee met today. We waited for about 45 minutes for our friends in the opposition to come. We messaged the secretary to the leader of the opposition who said ‘it seems like they won’t be coming to the meeting’,” he added.
Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar told media persons, “We had prepared for the talks; I wish they had come”.
Meanwhile, PTI Chairman Barrister Gohar Ali Khan told reporters in Islamabad that the party had already made it clear that it was not sitting down for talks for “hi hello or photo sessions” as government had still not announced the commissions as we demanded.
