PM tasked to win over Sharif again

ISLAMABAD/ LAHORE: Amid a widening gulf of mistrust and increasing acrimony between the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), the federal government has decided to make a last-ditch effort to salvage the crumbling coalition in Punjab.

The PML-N has set the PPP a 45-day deadline to implement its 10-point economic agenda or else its ministers in the Punjab cabinet would be expelled. The deadline expires on February 23. In this backdrop, President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani had an important meeting at the Presidency in Islamabad on Sunday. According to an official statement issued after the meeting, the two leaders discussed the overall political situation, with particular reference to Zardari’s Japan visit.

Sources told The Express Tribune that Zardari asked Gilani to use his ‘goodwill’ with the PML-N leaders, especially its supremo Nawaz Sharif, to avert an imminent clash between the two major parties of the country.

Gilani is likely to meet Sharif in Lahore before the PML-N deadline expires. “We hope he (the prime minister) will convince Sharif not to take the extreme step,” a PPP lawmaker told The Express Tribune requesting anonymity.

Sources said that Gilani had phoned Sharif on Saturday night and expressed his desire for a meeting. Gilani wanted to convince the PML-N chief to drop some of the demands in his 10-point agenda which, according to him, are not feasible.

Later that night, Sharif spoke to some senior leaders of his party over phone and it was decided that the prime minister would be told that the future of the ruling coalition in Punjab hinges on the implementation of the 10-point agenda.

Sharif has repeatedly said that if the PPP fails to meet its demands, its seven ministers in the Punjab government would be expelled. Sharif’s younger brother and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif also hinted at a possible parting of ways between the two parties.

Speaking in Faisalabad, he said the fate of the PPP ministers would be decided after a meeting of the joint committee formed by the two parties for the implementation of the 10-point agenda on February 22.

The PML-N has convened a joint meeting of its central executive committee and parliamentary committee on February 25 where a strategy would be devised for expelling the PPP from the cabinet.

Muhammad Ashraf Khan Sohna, a PPP minister in Punjab, told The Express Tribune that they were prepared for the breakdown of their party’s alliance with the PML-N.

He said the PPP would sit on the opposition benches in the provincial assembly and come out as a formidable opposition.

Meanwhile, the two parties are also marking efforts to forge new alliances, in view of the possible collapse of their coalition in Punjab.

Last week, a group of 47 lawmakers from a breakaway faction of the PML-Q, commonly known as ‘Unification Bloc’, announced their support for the chief minister. The bloc has a majority in the PML-Q, led by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, which has 80-plus legislators in the Punjab Assembly.

With the ‘Unification’ Bloc on its side and 171 of its own lawmakers, the PML-N would have a comfortable majority in the assembly.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 21^st, 2011.