PESHAWAR: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which contested the general election on the slogan of change seems reluctant to implement this slogan in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly as some of the party MPAs defended the newly elected speaker and provincial chief of the PTI Asad Qaiser by arguing that he too could dual office like President Asif Ali Zardari.
Soon after taking oath of his office, the newly elected Speaker Asad Qaiser faced an embarrassing situation when parliamentary leaders of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and Awami National Party asked him to quit his party office as he must be impartial and non-partisan in his capacity as custodian of the House.
Asad Qaiser, who was elected unopposed as speaker of the provincial assembly, had won election as the provincial president of the PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa defeating Pervez Khattak, who on Friday would be elected as Leader of the House and would later take oath as chief minister.
In response to the demand from the opposition benches, provincial general secretary of the PTI and MPA Shaukat Yusufzai defended Asad Qaiser’s dual office by arguing that if President Asif Ali Zardari could hold two offices then there was no harm if Asad Qaiser held the offices of speaker of the assembly and the PTI president in the province.
This altercation took place in presence of chief minister-in-waiting Pervez Khattak, who once again played his cards well when he got elected his sister-in-law Nafeesa Inayatullah Khattak to the National Assembly on women’s reserved seats at the top of the PTI list.
A woman MPA in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly told this scribe that the other two MNAs elected to the National Assembly on PTI ticket were also relatives of Pervez Khattak. The PTI won four seats of MNAs and Nafeesa Inayatullah Khattak, Musarrat Ahmadzeb, Sajida Zulfiqar and Ayesha Gulalai were elected from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
A female PTI worker, whose name was 19th on the PTI list for women’s reserved seats, told The News that Musarrat Ahmadzeb, who was married into the family of Wali of Swat, is the cousin of Pervez Khattak while Sajida Zulfiqar is a niece of the chief minister-designate. Pervez Khattak had in the past got elected his son-in law Adnan Khan to the Senate on the PPP ticket when he was part of the ANP-PPP government in the province.
On the other hand, Romana Jalil, daughter of Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) leader Abdul Jalil Jan was lucky to get the chance of being elected as MPA to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly on women’s reserved seats when the JUI-F’s Naeema Akhtar opted for the National Assembly as the party had put her name on the top of the list for both the National Assembly and provincial assembly given to Election Commission.
An odd man out in the assembly was Ghulam Mohammad, the lone MPA of the All Pakistan Muslim League who was elected to the provincial assembly for the second time from the remote Chitral district despite the fact that the General (R) Pervez Musharraf-led party had boycotted the May 11 general election.
Ghulam Mohammad responded to the invitation by the outgoing speaker Kiramatullah Khan to all the parliamentary leaders to come to the Speaker’s Chamber prior to the election of speaker and deputy speaker for achieving consensus on the issue. Ghulam Mohammad may be the lone MPA of his party but he is also its parliamentary leader.
A few MPAs stood out in the assembly on Thursday due to their choice of clothes and colour. Among them was PTI’s minority MPA Sooran Singh in his red-coloured turban and PPP MPA Nighat Yasmin Orakzai wearing bright red clothes.
However, none of the four MPAs of the ANP, also known as the party of red shirts, wore the party’s trademark red cap. Its parliamentary leader Sardar Hussain Babak was wearing black shalwar-kameez and waistcoat.
