Islamabad: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has announced that by-polls on 31 more seats of the National Assembly (NA) would take place on March 19.
The announcement was made on Friday by the ECP as it already had also announced to conduct by-polls on 35 more NA seats on March 16.
The seats had fallen vacant after the ECP denotified the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) lawmakers last month following NA Speaker Raja Pervaiz Ashraf’s acceptance of the resignations.
Following this, the Senior Vice-Presient of the PTI, Fawad Chaudhry, had claimed that the PTI would contest all 33 seats of the National Assembly. He had added that Imran Khan would be PTI’s sole candidate for these 33 seats.
However, Chairman Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Imran Khan has decided against contesting by-polls on the National Assembly seats himself and to field ex-MNAs in their respective constituencies.
Soon after the ouster of Imran Khan from the Prime Minister’s office in April this year, 123 MNAs of the PTI submitted their resignations en masse, out of which only 11 had been accepted by Speaker Raja Pervaiz Ashraf last year.
In December last year, when a delegation of PTI met the speaker, he insisted that he would accept the resignation letters of the remaining PTI MNAs individually in line with the rules of the National Assembly (NA) and the Constitution of Pakistan.
However, sensing their possible return to the assembly, the speaker accepted the resignations of all PTI MNAs in phases.
