ISLAMABAD, Feb 28: The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) on Friday predicted a possible revolt in Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali’s coalition from which about 20 of the party’s own MNAs have defected in the past three months.

However, the rebel group from the PPP’s parliamentary arm that calls itself PPP-Patriots says it hopes more defectors will join it and that it will get more slots in Prime Minister Jamali’s cabinet.

A PPP spokesman said resentment within the ruling coalition led by PML-Q was apparent from Thursday’s election of four senators from the Islamabad capital territory when an unusually large number of MNAs’ votes were rejected either for casting blank ballots or wrong markings.

Thursday’s election of four Islamabad senators by the 342-seat National Assembly and eight Fata senators by only 12 MNAs from the northwestern tribal agencies marked the completion of the 100-seat Senate and the two-chamber parliament.

PPP Spokesman Farhatullah Babar said that one reason for the new parliament being “very weak” was that Jamali’s government was “resting on a slender majority of disparate groups in the coalition who are pulling in different directions”.

“The rejection of over 50 votes in Senate elections (in Islamabad) is a clear indication of resentment within the ruling coalition,” he told Dawn .

The PML-Q won all the three seats it contested on from Islamabad and the fourth went to the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) of six Islamic parties in an electoral pact between the two camps.

Though the Election Commission did not announce it, parliamentary sources who saw Thursday’s vote-count said between 30 and 58 votes were declared invalid for being just blank ballot papers or for defective markings on them.

It was not clear whether the rejected ballots were polled by MNAs from the ruling coalition or the MMA which is in opposition at the centre, although it rules the NWFP and has joined the PML-Q-led government in Balochistan.

“The revolting members have registered their protest without disclosing their identities,” Babar said. “The next step will be an open revolt.”

Thirty of the 54 invalid ballot papers were found blank in the election for a technocrat’s seat won by former Senate chairman Wasim Sajjad by 199 votes to 71 of PPP’s Farrukh Saleem.

Fifty-eight votes were invalid in the election of PML-Q’s Mrs Tahira Lateef for a women’s seat by 193 votes against 74 of PPP’s Sofia Imtiaz. Thirty votes were rejected in the election for two general seats won by former information minister Mushahid Hussain Syed of the PML-Q and MMA’s Prof Ghafoor Ahmed by 117 and 114 votes respectively against 68 of PPP’s B.A. Malik.

Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat, one of the leaders of the PPP-Patriots, said on Thursday that more PPP MNAs— from about 60 still loyal to the party— were likely to join his group, but he could not yet give an exact number.

He told reporters that more members of his group, which is led by Defence Minister Rao Sikandar Iqbal and includes Petroleum and Natural Resources Minister Chaudhry Noraiz Shakoor, would join the cabinet Mr Jamali has promised to expand.

Mr Babar, who was elected as a PPP senator from the Frontier province in Monday’s election of 88 senators by the four provincial assemblies, said his party did not think the ruling coalition would complete its five-year term because of what he called an “element of clash...between the elected representatives and the security establishment”.

“Through the LFO (Legal Framework Order) and insistence of Gen Musharraf, the military-civilian equation is being rewritten on the terms of generals alone, he said. “This is the greatest destabilizing factor.”