ISLAMABAD: A senior Pakistani politician belonging to the ruling coalition said on Sunday he would become party to a petition in the country’s top court against the deputy speaker of the Punjab Assembly whose ruling changed the outcome of the chief minister’s election on Friday.
Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the top leader of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) alliance and chief of Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) party, announced his decision while addressing a news conference to discuss recent political developments.
The assembly’s deputy speaker, Dost Mohammad Mazari, ruled in favor of the candidate of the ruling coalition, Hamza Shehbaz, after receiving a letter from the top Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) leader which revealed that 10 provincial lawmakers belonging to his faction had voted against the party discipline.
Mazari invalidated the votes cast by the PML-Q lawmakers against Shehbaz’s rival, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, giving rise to a new debate about whether the party line in such matters was determined by its chief or leader of the parliamentary party within an assembly. Elahi later challenged the ruling in the Supreme Court.
“A party leader directs his parliamentary party despite not being a member [of the assembly],” Rehman told the news conference according to the Associated Press of Pakistan. “However, a new discussion has started that only parliamentary leader has the authority to lead the party in the assembly.”
The PDM leader called for the formation of a full court bench for hearing the petition while noting that all office bearers of a political party were subordinates of their party chief.
The demand for a bigger Supreme Court bench was also endorsed by other parties in the ruling coalition in a joint statement.
Geo TV reported Pakistan’s law minister Azam Nazeer Tarar as saying that the demand was made since the case was going to have “far-reaching consequences” for the country’s future politics.
