Punjab Assembly: ‘PML-Q now bigger than Unification Bloc’

Bloc member crosses over to opposition benches during budget speech.

LAHORE:

Several members of the Unification Bloc, a dissident faction that broke away from the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) to back the PML-Nawaz government in Punjab, are to return to their parent party once Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi establishes a camp office at the State Guest House, sources in the Unification Bloc told The Express Tribune.

MPA Chaudhry Muhammad Arshad announced his return to the party fold during Friday’s budget session by sitting on the opposition benches with his PML-Q colleagues. He told The Express Tribune on Saturday that others would soon join him and that by his count, the PML-Q now had the support of more members than the Unification Bloc.

The Unification Bloc was formed when 47 of the 81 PML-Q MPAs in the Punjab Assembly broke from the opposition benches and applied to the PA Secretariat for separate seats. They argued that as they represented a majority of PML-Q MPAs, they could not be disqualified for voting against party policy under the floor-crossing law.

MPA Muhammad Rizwan later switched sides again to leave the Unification Bloc with 46 members. PML-Q Parliamentary Leader Chaudhry Zaheeruddin Khan filed a reference against nine of the 46 members with the Election Commission of Pakistan, seeking their disqualification for supporting the PML-N in opposition to the directions of the head of their party.

Sources said that the Unification Bloc consists of eight small groupings of members. They said that keeping them all happy was difficult for the government, as was demonstrated when the chief minister was expected to announce the addition of several Unification Bloc members to the cabinet in place of PPP ministers in March. The expansion had to be postponed because all of the Bloc members were pushing for portfolios and the government feared that it would disintegrate if it included only some of them in the cabinet.

The sources said that some of these groups could be persuaded to rejoin the PML-Q once Senior Federal Minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi establishes his camp office at the State Guest House. The office is being renovated, though Federal Service Tribunal member Mirza GM Sikandar works there as liaison officer at present to help resolve PML-Q members’ and workers’ issues relating to the federal and provincial governments.

The sources said that Elahi had asked Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani to also appoint Yousaf Naseem Khokhar, the CEO of the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authority, to the State Guest House. They said that Sikandar and Khokhar, trusted allies of Elahi, would prove useful in the PML-Q campaign to get its members back from the Unification Bloc.

Arshad said that he believed that only 13 Unification Bloc members were completely committed to the PML-N. The rest, he said, would rejoin the PML-Q once Elahi’s camp office is set up. He said that the strength of the Bloc had fallen from 46 to 39 members, while the PML-Q’s had increased to 42. He said that he and fellow MPA Syed Raza Ali Gilani would formally rejoin the PML-Q soon.

Gilani told The Express Tribune that he was staying with the Bloc and would try to unite the PML. He said that Elahi’s camp office and allies in the bureaucracy “might change the numbers game in Punjab”.

Mian Ata Maneka, a senior Unification Bloc member, said that he no longer counted Arshad and his allies as partners. He said that Elahi was trying to take back Bloc members but he would not succeed.



Published in The Express Tribune, June 12th, 2011.