December 12, 2002	Thursday	Shawwal 7, 1423

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ISLAMABAD, Dec 11: A rift raging in the PML-Q could only be a moral pique for Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali’s fledgling government but will tighten the hold of powerful Chaudhries of Gujrat on the ruling party, political sources said on Wednesday.

They said the rift, which has been simmering for about two months but burst out in the open on Tuesday with the announcement of a no-confidence move against PML-Q president Mian Mohammad Azhar, also has the potential to mother another faction of the fractured party.

Mr Azhar on Wednesday rejected the no-confidence move as an un- constitutional ploy of the Chaudhries, led by PML-Q parliamentary party leader Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, making it clear he will not take the move lying down when it comes for a vote in the party’s general council called to meet on Dec 20.

The 950-member council’s emergency meeting in Islamabad was announced by party acting secretary-general Salim Saifullah at a news conference on Tuesday where National Assembly member Chaudhry Wajahat Hussain, a younger brother of Shujaat Hussain, said as many as 450 councillors had signed the no-confidence resolution.

The move came only 19 days after the 342-seat National Assembly elected Mr Jamali as prime minister by a paper-thin majority and was the latest in a series of dramatic developments that saw his coalition slipping to a minority after the 17-seat Muttahida Qaumi Movement withdrew support but later succeeding to win back the Karachi-based party.

Political sources said Azhar’s certain ouster would not pose an immediate threat to Mr Jamali’s coalition government because the party president does not have many diehard supporters in the National Assembly while the government was expected to pacify those who may be grudging the denial of ministerial and other positions of influence or benefit to them so far.

But they said it would be a moral embarrassment for Mr Jamali as well as the Chaudhries to ditch a man who was the first to raise the banner of revolt against then prime minister Nawaz Sharif — before the October 1999 army take-over that toppled Sharif — and became the main catalyst for President Pervez Musharraf’s loyalists to break away from the formerly ruling PML-N and form their own PML-Q faction.

Mr Azhar’s political star had waned after he failed to win a National Assembly seat in the election and was also barred from contesting for the Senate under a controversial presidential decree that disqualified losers in the general election to seek a seat in the Upper House, which is indirectly elected mainly by the provincial assemblies.

In recent weeks, Azhar is reported to have been privately accusing the Chaudhries of plotting his election defeat. He has also been complaining about what he regards more than due cabinet posts given to defectors from the People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) and Jamali’s nomination of Salim Saifullah as party’s acting secretary-general in his place.

Political sources said Shujaat Hussain was certain to be elected as the PML-Q president at the Dec 20 session of the PML-Q general council after it votes out Azhar on charges including causing harm to party interests and responsibility for the party’s failure to win a majority in the Oct 10 elections.

In a somewhat replay of political battles in which Nawaz Sharif replaced former prime minister Mohammad Khan Junejo as party leader in the late 1980s, this will make Shujaat Hussain an unchallenged arbiter in the party while his cousin Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi holds the chief ministership of the most populous province of Punjab and they have the right rapport with President Musharraf similar to one Nawaz Sharif had with the late Gen Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq

Mr Azhar told a private television channel on Wednesday that the Chaudhries came out with the move against him only a day after Shujaat Hussain and Pervaiz Elahi met him and told him that “you are our brother” and that Mr Jamali had acted unconstitutionally by naming an acting secretary general.

“But now it is clear that Chaudhry Sahibaan have the main hand in this (affair),” he said.

Strangely, Azhar has won a word of sympathy from the PML-N that has been accusing him of betraying the party.

“Despite the fact that Mian Azhar dissociated from Nawaz Sharif at a time when he should have stood by him, the present action against him shows that Musharraf’s team led by the Chaudhries does not believe in any morality, law, constitution or party discipline,” a PML-N spokesman, Mohammad Siddique-ul-Farooq told Dawn.

“The Chaudhries wanted to hijack the party after backstabbing Nawaz Sharif (and) therefore they played this dirty game,” he said.

“As you sow, so shall you reap,” PPP spokesman Farhatullah Babar commented in a reference to PPP defectors that his party says switched sides under government pressure.