Islamabad: Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) leader Imran Khan on Wednesday expressed his conditional willingness to hold talks with the government on finding a solution to the current political crisis.
And the condition, he told a local private television channel in an interview, was that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif resign first. “Our number one priority is Sharif’s resignation. When talks take place the Supreme Court should be a guarantor for implementing what is decided during negotiations,” he said.
Khan talked to the channel’s representative at the site where his party workers and supporters are staging a sit-in along with demonstrators of Islamic scholar Tahirul Qadri’s Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT).
Later, addressing the PTI supports amid chants of “Go, Nawaz Go,” Imran Khan said he has formed a committee for talks and asked the government to also nominate a panel. But he reiterated that talks would serve no purpose without Sharif’s resignation.
The PTI leader said he was ready to spend a year in the container in which he is living at the camp site. He named the venue as “Azadi (Freedom) Square.”
Imran announced that he has cancelled a planned march to the prime minister’s house, where army troops are deployed for protection.
Sharif’s daughter Mariam Nawaz, in a tweet, scoffed at the PTI leader’s demand for the prime minister’s resignation.
“Imran Khan can spend his whole life in the container but Nawaz Sharif will not resign,” she wrote.
Later Qadri, interviewed by the same channel, said he had never been against dialogue. He also confirmed that two federal ministers, Khawaja Saad Rafique and Qad Baloch, along with politicians Haider Abbas Rizvi of Muttahida Qaumi Movement and Mohammad Ejazul Haq had visited the PAT camp.
He said the government team would visit the camp again when a committee nominated by him would hold talks with them in the presence of representatives of the parties allied with PAT.
The visit of the ministers marked the first direct contact between the government team and Qadri’s party. Saad Rafique said the contact with PAT was positive and said dialogue was the right way to address the issues.
Signs of emerging thaw followed when Pakistan military formally announced that the situation “requires patience, wisdom and sagacity from all sides to resolve prevailing impasse through meaningful dialogue in larger national and public interest.”
Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Sharif attended a session of the National Assembly held amid PAT workers’ noisy protests close to the parliament building being guarded by the army.
Qadri, however, ordered PAT demonstrators to retreat, which they did, thus averting a likely clash with the police. After the session the prime minister returned to his official residence from the parliament through a reserved driveway.
