10 More Committees Formed, Opposition Gets Zero
Parliament formed 10 more committees on Sunday, 6 September 2026. Once again, every top seat went to the ruling party, and the fight over a key reform promise remains unresolved.
In a Nutshell
- On September 6, Parliament formed 10 more standing committees, bringing the total to 36 out of 50.
- Not one of these 10 new committees has an opposition MP as chairman.
- Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed says the opposition will only get committee chairs after the Constitution is formally changed.
- Opposition leader Syed Abdullah Mohammad Taher says the two sides already agreed to give the opposition 26% of committee chairs, and the government is breaking that promise.
- Salahuddin says the opposition must first join the special committee working on constitutional changes before getting any chairs.
Context
Parliamentary standing committees are small groups of MPs assigned to oversee specific ministries or issues, such as finance, health, or public accounts. They check government spending, review audit reports, question officials, and ensure ministries are functioning properly. Each committee has a chairman who runs its meetings and decides what gets discussed. Because committees look closely at how public money is used and how ministries perform, having a strong, active chairman matters a lot for keeping the government accountable.
Back in July 2026, the opposition walked out of Parliament because a special committee to change the Constitution was formed without them. They wanted a separate process instead, based on the July Charter. The government said that the separate process has no legal basis. That old fight is now blocking a different promise: giving the opposition a fair share of committee chairs.
Why It Matters
This is really a fight about what comes first. The government says the July Charter is just a political agreement, not a law, so its promise on committee chairs can only be honoured after the Constitution is officially changed. And that change can't happen unless the opposition joins the committee working on it.
The opposition says these are two separate issues; giving them committee chairs should not be delayed until the constitutional fight is over. The government even denies ever agreeing to give the opposition 10 chairs in the first place.
This matters because committee chairs control which government spending, ministries, and public projects get checked and questioned. As long as both sides stay stuck, real oversight of the government stays on hold, too.
What we think
Both sides are reading the same promise differently, and neither reading can be proven wrong from the text alone, since it doesn't give an exact number of seats. Meanwhile, most ministry committees are already filled with ruling-party chairs, so giving seats to the opposition later means undoing decisions that have already been made, which is harder than doing it right the first time. There's also a bigger risk here: if this Parliament gets away with delaying a power-sharing promise by attaching it to an unrelated condition, future governments of any party may use the same trick to stall reforms they don't like.