ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) ongoing withdrawal from parliamentary business has now extended to the Senate, with senior party-backed lawmakers stepping down from key standing committees in line with directives from party founder Imran Khan.
After multiple PTI members quit National Assembly committees last week, Senator Mirza Muhammad Afridi confirmed his resignation from five major Senate panels, including commerce, industries and production, education, energy, and inter-provincial coordination.
“I am relinquishing my committee memberships in compliance with the directive issued by the party’s founder,” Afridi said in a short statement, underscoring that his decision was based on party instructions rather than personal choice.
He was soon joined by senior PTI leader and former federal minister Azam Khan Swati, who resigned from five committees covering cabinet, economic affairs, health, law and justice, and rules and procedure.
In a strongly worded statement, Swati described the move as a deliberate protest. “These resignations are meant to register our opposition to a system that has lost its ability to uphold constitutional order and the rule of law,” he said, adding that the resignations were submitted through PTI’s parliamentary leader in the Senate, Senator Ali Zafar, for onward transmission to the Senate chairman.
The resignations come just a day after Imran Khan instructed all PTI senators to vacate their committee posts, marking a coordinated escalation of the party’s disengagement strategy.
The step mirrors similar resignations in the National Assembly last month, where PTI lawmakers began withdrawing from committees en masse. The first notable departure came from Junaid Akbar, who stepped down as chairman of the powerful Public Accounts Committee (PAC). His move was quickly followed by 18 resignations formally submitted to the NA speaker’s office by party chairman Barrister Gohar Ali Khan. PTI’s Information Secretary, Sheikh Waqas Akram, also resigned from both the PAC and the Standing Committee on Information.
Observers see the Senate resignations as part of PTI’s broader effort to signal its rejection of what it claims is a manipulated and illegitimate parliamentary framework a move that further distances the party from the country’s institutional decision-making process.
