A six-member committee, constituted by Punjab Assembly Speaker Rana Muhammad Iqbal Khan for the appointment of a caretaker chief minister, will hold its first meeting on Sunday (today).
The meeting comes in the wake of a deadlock between former chief minister Shahbaz Sharif and former opposition leader in Punjab Assembly Raja Riaz, who rejected each other’s choices for caretaker chief minister.
At the end of the three-day consultative sessions between Shahbaz and Riaz ended on March 23, both men forwarded two names each to the six-member committee for a caretaker CM, according to Article 224A of the Constitution.
According to a notification issued by the PA secretariat, out of three opposition members on the committee, two are from PPP: Major (retd) Zulfiqar Gondal, Shaukat Mehmood Basra and one is PML-Q’s Chaudhry Zahiruddin Khan, while the PML-N has proposed three names: Rana Sanaullah Khan, Mian Mujtaba Shujul Rehman and Iqbal Channar.
The committee will convene its first meeting at the assembly chamber at 11:00am, where it will deliberate the four names for caretaker chief minister. It has three days (March 24, 25, 26) to narrow the selection down to one name.
Meanwhile, the PPP has once again changed its list of nominees.
Raja Riaz has forwarded two names to the committee — senior journalist Najam Sethi and former chief justice of Lahore High Court Justice (retd) Syed Zahid Hussain Bukhari.
Sources in the PPP told The Express Tribune that Sethi’s nomination comes from the Presidency, where President Asif Zardari had asked party members on the committee to negotiate his name for caretaker chief minister.
One of the committee’s members, Shaukat Basra, said Sethi is a public figure and that is why the PPP wants to see him as caretaker chief minister. He added that Sethi has an unbiased approach towards issues and knows how to run the administrative affairs of the province. Basra added that Sethi also has experience as a cabinet minister from the caretaker set-up in 1996.
Earlier, in its official letter to Shahbaz Sharif, the PPP had presented two other names. In his first letter, Raja Riaz sent three names: former chief secretary Hafeez Akhtar Randhawa, Mian Aamir Mehmood and Asma Jahangir.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 24th, 2013.