LAHORE, Feb 22: The Pakistan Muslim League-Q holds President Pervez Musharraf and his policies responsible for its defeat in the general election, but has no plans to distance itself from him because of the role he can play in keeping together whatever is left of the entity that he had cobbled together some six years ago.

A senior party leader said on Friday leaders of the PPP and the PML-N were mistaken in assuming that the president would quit because of the pressure being mounted by the rivals-turned-allies.

“It will be unrealistic to say that the president will step down and the new assemblies will continue to function. The assemblies will not be there to take any kind of steps against the president,” he said, implying that President Musharraf could invoke his powers under Article 58-2-B to sack them before they could proceed against him.

The MNAs-elect and the party candidates who lost the election are scheduled to meet in Islamabad on Saturday (today) to review the situation and work out the party’s future strategy.

A meeting of the provincial legislators-elect was held in Lahore on Thursday which ended with the formation of a committee that will compile a report on all factors that led to the ‘debacle’.

The party has received complaints from 39 national and provincial seats in Punjab alone where the PML-Q candidates were defeated by a margin of 38 to 1,000 votes. It has been alleged that thousands of votes polled by the party candidates were rejected.

However, no election petition would be filed by the ‘aggrieved’ candidates as, according to the source, “everybody knows how the victory and defeat are pre-determined by the establishment”.

The PML-Q source said everything done positive by the party government had been neutralised by the war on terror, the judicial crisis, confrontation with the media, the Lal Masjid operation, shortage of wheat flour, power and gas and skyrocketing prices of the essential commodities.

He said although the party was supposed to formulate policies for the government, in practice all policies were coming from the presidency and the government was duty-bound to blindly implement them.

One leader had said recently that then prime minister Shaukat Aziz had sent a reference against Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry to President Musharraf without taking the party into confidence. Then, he said, the president had taken the drastic decision of imposing emergency on baseless fears. The PML-Q leadership had played no role in both the events that had changed the course of the country’s history.

Ruling out the possibility of PML-Q leaders joining the PML-N or a merger of the two factions, the source said neither would happen in the presence of President Musharraf.

He admitted that some elected leaders wanted to join the government, no matter who formed it. However, he said, the party would succeed in convincing such people that such a policy would serve no useful purpose.