New beginnings …and hopefully, endings

AND it finally begins. The National Assembly has started its first session following the change in government. This is unchartered territory, because the change in dispensation hasn’t been because of an election; the chamber and its members remain the same. only alliances within the assembly have shifted, which have yielded a new leader of the house and, of course, a different bloc within the house that now sits on the treasury benches.

The problem, of course, is that it is all treasury benches now. The erstwhile ruling party’s members have tendered their resignations. Yes, 22 dissidents from within the PTI still remain in the assembly and, since there was no need for them to cross the floor, so to speak, they are the claimants of the opposition benches. But the problem with that is that the dissidents, depending on what the supreme Court rules on 63-A, will also shift over to the treasury. If they don’t, they’re still going to be treasury members, in effect.

That doesn’t make for a lopsided house, it makes for an incomplete house. This is a state of affairs that doesn’t bode well for the legislative process or even the executive branch of the government either, given how the lack of a functional parliament won’t provide an effective pressure valve to the polity.

Matters are worse in the Punjab Assembly, where a ruling on 63-A is far more crucial. The chief minister’s father tallied the required numbers from the erstwhile government’s coalition members in the NA without getting a single PTI member. The CM, on the other hand, definitely needs to poach members of the PTI.

It is the CM who has said, on a number of occasions now, that the time is right to get a fresh mandate from the people. Perhaps that is the only way out of the impasse at the moment. It is time for the government coalition to undo the amendments made to the election process by the previous dispensation, as has been its principled stance, and then to call for fresh elections.