Friction over posts delays PML-N restructuring

For the third time, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)’s top leadership has extended the deadline for the party’s reorganisation – a move that seems to point towards rift in the ranks of the second-largest party in parliament.

Several party officials told The Express Tribune here on Thursday that PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif has now directed the provincial organisational committees to complete the process by the end of September.

He had earlier set a deadline of August 14 for completing the party’s reorganisation at the national, provincial and grassroots levels.

The party had also missed its the previous deadline of March this year for this purpose.

Last year, Sharif dismissed all the intra party organisations in order to hold fresh elections, announcing that the process would be completed by March this year.

A spokesperson for Sharif attributed the delay to ‘logistical’ problems the provincial reorganisation committees are facing, but insiders said there are ‘more complex and worrying issues’ behind the delay. PML-N information secretary Ahsan Iqbal confirmed that Sharif had withdrawn the deadline for a month-and-a-half but denied the decision was to overcome differences within.

“Mainly, it is due to logistics reasons… it is a long process, starting from grassroots and going up to the national level. That’s why it is taking such a long time,” Ahsan explained to The Express Tribune. Unlike Ahsan, a number of PML-N officials, who requested their names not be mentioned, said that the purpose behind the delay is to give the provincial organisation committee more time to overcome what they termed simmering differences.

The intensity of the problem, they revealed, was greater in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where some office bearers had rejected Sharif’s nominees as committee heads.

In Balochistan, former senator Khuda-e-Noor was picked by Sharif to be the head of the committee, but a large number of the party’s veterans objected to the choice and threatened to not take part in the process. The threat was so loud and worrisome that Sharif sent his party’s former secretary general Iqbal Zafar Jhagrha to cool down tempers there.

Khuda-e-Noor has recently switched his loyalties to the PML-N and the party leadership was quick to pick him for the key provincial post, ignoring old loyalists. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as well, there are signs of differences among three groups, one each led by key leaders from Hazara, Kohat and Peshawar districts.

The provincial reorganisation committee has so far been able to hold just one meeting in Abbottabad last month and even that was boycotted by office bearers from some southern districts.

The support for a constitutional amendment for renaming of the province, some officials said, was one of the reasons that played a part in dividing the party on ethnic grounds – a setback the PML-N is still struggling to overcome.

Similarly, in Punjab, the party’s reorganisation efforts have hardly been moving ahead due to serious differences among top leaders belonging to the central and southern parts of the province.

According to insiders, leaders from southern Punjab, a region known as the Seraiki area, have demanded some key posts not only in the party but also in any future political setup in Lahore.

The party, they have warned, should not look like a family fiefdom of the Sharifs, according to insiders. Already in the middle of a fight with the media and in the line of fire for its alleged ‘backing’ of some jihadi groups, these internal differences can cast a long shadow over the future of the party, observers believe.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 16^th, 2010.