Press Gallery: PML-N on back foot as PPP plays south trump card

PPP sees the issue as a vote-winner in south Punjab, a region of 45 million people.

LAHORE:

The Pakistan Peoples Party, no stranger to grassroots politicking, has wrested the initiative on the issue of a separate province in southern Punjab.

The party, mindful of its dwindling fortunes in the face of back-breaking inflation and crippling energy shortages, sees the issue as a vote-winner in south Punjab, a region of 45 million people.

While the PPP champions the cause of a separate province for the Seraiki belt, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, bound by its political compulsions in urban and middle-class central and north Punjab, drags its feet on the issue.

As a possible election year approaches, many wonder what the PPP has in its arsenal to fend off stiff opposition from the PML-N and Imran Khan’s Tehreek-i-Insaaf.

The incumbency factor looks likely to weigh heavily against it.

By supporting a Seraiki province, calls for which form the most popular slogans down south these days, the party has thrown down the gauntlet in the battle to preserve its vote bank in lower Punjab.

Just before the Punjab Assembly went into session on Monday, the PPP and PML-Quaid adopted a resolution calling on the federal government to move to establish a separate province in southern Punjab.

While the PML-N drowned in the semantics of naming, insisting that there would be no new province based on language or ethnicity, the PPP offered open-ended support for a popular cause.

The PML-N has decided to hold its ground: it will support only those causes which are not ethnic or linguistic. It has confined itself to reacting to what the PPP and PML-Q are proposing. It is odd that the PML-N has been unable to figure out why the people of south Punjab want a new province.

If not on the basis of language or ethnicity, why would they want a separate province? And what’s wrong with the speakers of a certain language demanding a province? Why did the Pashtuns of the north pursue the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa moniker for NWFP?

The reason is simple: politics is about identity. Denying people the aspiration of defining their own identity would be wrong.

Are the people living in KP today less patriotic than when they were living in NWFP?

By championing a separate south Punjab province, the PPP has thrown open the race for votes in the region. The PML-N, rooted in urban Punjab in the centre and north, faces a two-fold challenge.

The PTI surge has shaken the foundations of the throne on which Nawaz Sharif sat pretty in central Punjab, while the PPP has seized the initiative in the south. Imran Khan, it is widely believed, has nowhere to grow except central and north Punjab. The PML-N faces one of its biggest challenges ever and unless it does something incisive and decisive, and soon, it stands to lose a lot of ground to its rivals.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 13^th, 2011.