ISLAMABAD – The opposition in the Senate has demanded of the PTI government to summon the joint sitting of parliament to discuss the on-going UAE-facilitated backdoor talks between India and Pakistan.
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the major opposition party in the upper house of parliament, has made the demand in the wake of some media reports that United Arab Emirates (UAE) is mediating between India and Pakistan to help the two nuclear-armed rivals mend their relations to some ‘functional’ level.
“The Pakistani nation are a free and sovereign people and have every right to participate in decision-making with reference to their future may it concern; economic sovereignty, territorial sovereignty, foreign relations, national security priorities,” said former chairman Senate and the opposition party Senator Mian Raza Rabbani while talking to a select group of journalists here.
He went on to say that the federal government is treating the Pakistani people as if “they have been colonized.” The news of IMF-PTI agreement was leaked through documents released by international lender itself, he said adding that now the ‘Track-II’ diplomacy between India and Pakistan has been exposed by the UAE Ambassador in the US.
Earlier this week, the UAE ambassador to Washington had confirmed in a public statement that the Gulf state was mediating between the two rivals in South Asia so that they can reach some functional relationship.
Rabbani said that PTI government didn’t realize that by isolating the people from the process of national decision making, it is further alienating a population which already feels that they have no stake in the state. It is making the people to believe that “the state is failing to deliver and or associate them in the mainstream.”
“Decision making limited to the elite may have been possible in 60s, but now excluding the people, will give rise to extreme movements and sectarianism.”
PPP demanded that the government immediately call a joint sitting of the parliament where the IMF-PTI deal and Track-II diplomacy between India and Pakistan be discussed. The session with reference to India Pakistan talks can be held in-camera, Rabbani suggested.
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