In view of the ruling on reserved seats by the Supreme Court, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has suspended the membership of 77 lawmakers.
Last week, the Supreme Court halted the decisions of the Peshawar High Court (PHC) and the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), which had decided to award Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) reserved seats to other parties.
With 44 of its legislators losing their seats as a result of the Supreme Court's verdict, the governing PML-N would suffer the greatest loss.
Previously, the PML-N, PPP, JUI-F, MQM-P, and PML-Q were among the other parties that received the reserved seats of SIC around the country.
Punjab Assembly Speaker Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan initially put the Supreme Court's ruling into practice last week when he suspended the membership of 27 MPAs.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's verdict, the ruling alliance in Punjab lost three minority MPAs and twenty-four women legislators.
There were 23 MPAs from PML-N, two from PPP, and one from each of IPP and PML-Q among the suspended MPAs.
The ECP agreed on March 4th to accept the applications of the opposing parties and to apportion seats in the National Assembly and provincial legislatures using a proportional representation mechanism based on the seats that political parties had won.
A total of 77 reserved seats were lost by the PTI-backed SIC as a result of the development: 23 National Assembly seats (20 held by women and 3 by minorities), 25 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly seats (21 held by women and 4 by minorities), two held by women in the Sindh Assembly, and 27 held by women and 3 by minorities in the Punjab Assembly.
The Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) had also filed pleas for the reserved seats of women and minorities, but the Peshawar High Court rejected them.
The party challenged the Election Commission of Pakistan's (ECP) decision to deny the SIC the seats allotted for women and minorities.