PML-N reorganisation: Fourth deadline expires

In Nov, Sharif said PML-N would elect new office-bearers in six weeks.

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has recently emerged strong enough to force the government to agree to its terms on critical national issues, but the party appears to be far from overcoming internal divisions to complete a lingering reorganisation in more than 16 months.

Former premier Nawaz Sharif announced after a meeting here in early November that the party would be through with the process of electing new office-bearers at district, provincial and national levels in six weeks.

But more than 10 weeks since then there hasn’t been any apparent headway in the party’s reorganisation drive despite the fact that Sharif himself jumped into the process to bring leaders with diverging opinions to common grounds.

It was in September 2009 that Sharif dissolved all the structures of his league all over Pakistan with an announcement to reorganise them through intra-party elections within six months.

But over a year later, there hasn’t been much progress and the party, the second largest of the country, seems miles away from what it was supposed to accomplish by March this year.

At least three deadlines for electing new office bearers for the party’s local, provincial and national organisations — March 23, August 14 and September 30 — have so far been missed in the last one year alone. And the new year doesn’t seem any luckier for Sharif.

Though the top leaders of PML-N attribute missing of the latest deadline to the volatility the country politics has been going through recently, some officials say there is a lot more hindering the efforts to give the group a new look.

And a fear of further delay is keeping the party from announcing another cut-off date, though Sharif has asked an inner circle of his close associates to complete the process, at least till provincial levels, by end next month (February).

Published in The Express Tribune, January 18^th,  2011.