LAHORE: Opposition parties, including Jamaat-i-Islami which is ally of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf in the Khyber Pakhutnkhwa government, have played down the call for civil disobedience given by PTI Chairman Imran Khan on Sunday, saying the call is neither serious nor feasible in the present circumstances.

Pakistan People’s Party information secretary Qamar Zaman Kaira says Imran Khan caused his own political damage by giving the call for civil disobedience.

“The PTI chairman took an extreme step and reached a blind alley by giving the call and now his return to normal politics was impossible.”

Former interior minister Rehman Malik played down the call for civil disobedience and said that politicians used to employ such tactics for extracting the maximum from a situation. He was optimistic that the situation was still under control and urged Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to act as the ball is in his (PML-N chief’s) court.

He suggested the government to hold dialogue fore resolving the political tension and form two special teams for the purpose.

He said the government should have formed the committees before the Inqalab and Azadi marches left Lahore and should have tried to resolve the issues there.

He offered his and other parties’ help if the government found itself unable to convince both the PTI and PAT to come to the negotiation table.

Former president Asif Zardari’s coordinator for Punjab Naveed Chaudhry said the PTI neither took the parties nor the masses into confidence before giving the call.

He feared that the step would cause more damage to the national economy.

JI: JI secretary-general Liaquat Baloch says such a call has never been given by any political party since the inception of the country 67 years ago.

He said for the success of such a call one needed a grand movement but the PTI did it without making proper preparations.

He asserted that Imran Khan had given the call only to reinvigorate the PTI activists and to put more weight behind his demand for resignation of the prime minister and holding of new elections.

But the JI leader feared that it enhanced threats to the democratic setup by taking the situation to a point of no return.

He appealed to both the sides to show maturity and resolve the crisis before the ‘third party’ booted them out.

He urged the PTI chairman to confine his demands to electoral reforms for the time being as resignation of the prime minister at once would do no good to any party.

He argued that if the PM stepped down immediately, the next elections would be held under the same setup against which Imran Khan and other political players had been raising their fingers.

ANP: Awami National Party’s president-elect Asfandyar Wali Khan did not believe that the PTI was serious in giving the call.

He did not see any serious clash between the government and the opposition in the coming days.

About the talks, he said dialogue succeeded only when both the sides were serious for the process.

He suggested Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to take a vote of confidence from the parliament to ward off the pressure being built by the opposition on his office.

Published in Dawn, August 18th, 2014