ISLAMABAD: National Assembly (NA) Speaker Ayaz Sadiq fears that the assemblies might not complete their term and says he is seeing a greater plan in the offing.

He told TV channels that all the opposition parties except one intend to see the government complete its tenure. “Hopelessness is a sin but for the first time in my political career, I am disheartened.”

The speaker said that whatever was happening was not only damaging for one institution but for the entire country. The prevailing situation is not normal but unnatural, and Pakistan is surrounded by enemies, he said.

He said uncertainty was looming and has been fuelled by developments such as parliament’s non-approval of a constitutional bill to hold the next general elections on time. He said the smaller provinces will take to the court if the bill was not passed because their seats will be increased by holding the forthcoming polls on the new population census.

Sadiq said that if Punjab was ready to accept the reduction of the number of its seats for the benefit of smaller provinces, other federating units will inquire and go to court as to why they have been refused the advantage.

However, he said, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has asked for time to go through the process. “Chances are that people will start resorting to the option of resignations from assemblies [as part of a conspiracy to destabilise the democratic system].”

The delimitation of constituencies was decided by all the parliamentary players in line with the provisional results of the latest census. The bill has already been adopted by the National Assembly, but is not been approved by the opposition-dominated Senate mainly due to the attitude of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

The speaker said this was the first time he had felt hopeless towards politics. Talking about the Faizabad sit-in and Model Town tragedy, he said the government could not do much to deal with protests and sit-ins as it feared that even the slightest use of force would wreak havoc.

“I was not this much upset even in 2002 during Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorial rule as I’m now. It is not necessary that martial law will no disrupt the system, but Pakistan has been vulnerable in the past. Our internal challenges are bigger than external.”