Countercurrents: In bid to make Sindh inroads, Nawaz looks to Jatoi

Committee looks to add firepower to PML-N’s weakest province, Sindh.

LAHORE:

With the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) preparing to politically blitz Punjab, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)’s stronghold, the main opposition party plans to return the favour in the government’s stronghold: Sindh.

The PML-N has constituted a nine-member high-level committee to contact and coordinate with prominent politicians of Sindh to facilitate their joining the party, The Express Tribune has learnt.

The most telling part of the PML-N’s renewed effort is the apparent revamping of its guard. Absent from this committee is Ghous Ali Shah, PML-N’s long time Sindh president. Shah and Sharif go back to the days of Gen Ziaul Haq, when the former was Sindh chief minister and the latter Punjab’s.

But relations, according to sources in the party, were never the best. Sharif, they say, doesn’t trust Shah – and didn’t even want to make him PML-N president. The only reason he was made the president was that backlash from Shah’s support base would have dwindled the little presence PML-N had in Sindh to begin with.

However, that is no longer the case.

At the vanguard of PML-N’s Sindh push are some new additions. There is newly added former chief minister Liaquat Jatoi, who has already begun making major changes to the N’s provincial setup.

There is also the other new addition, Mumtaz Bhutto, a veteran politician, who, while lacking electoral power, certainly brings symbolic resistance to the PPP. Though he himself is not on the committee, his son, Ameer Bux, is.

According to an official handout, the committee constituted by Sharif to convince politicians to join PML-N is under the supervision of Jatoi, who is committee coordinator.

Ameer Bux Bhutto, Irfanullah Marwat, Dr Bahadur Dahri, Ismail Rahu, Imdad Chandio, Marvi Memon, Saleem Zia and Raja Ansari are members of the committee.

Aside from Jatoi, the others are not actual contenders in direct electoral politics. But their task is important.

According to sources, Jatoi has been given the task to initiate talks and lock deals with his former PML-Q partymen, particularly the Mehar family, the Sherazis of Thatta, and the Malkani family. Some party members have been asked to approach the nationalists in Sindh – while Ameer Bux Bhutto has been assigned the task to rally support against President Asif Ali Zardari in the name of Bhuttoism.

Since last year’s floods, Nawaz Sharif has so far visited Sindh a number of times and addressed some two dozen public gatherings in an effort to make inroads in the province, where his party is effectively nonexistent.

It is pertinent to mention that President Zardari last month visited Lahore, Multan and Okara and lashed out at the Sharifs just to win back PPP’s disgruntled vote banks particularly in Central Punjab.

PPP has already played its card of a south Punjab province and it believed that it would easily win more than 30 seats of NA in South Punjab. At present out of 148 seats of NA in Punjab, PPP has more than 50 seats.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 19^th, 2012.