LAHORE: As the newly-elected PPP Punjab chapter office-bearers are drawing up a strategy to bring the ‘disgruntled’ leaders and workers back in the party, a majority of them seem uninterested in returning to the party folds.

PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari had recently given the task to win back the angry workers to the Punjab chapter. The party leaders will not only contact those who joined the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf but also the workers such as Nahid Khan and Safdar Abbasi who made their own factions.

“We (PPP Punjab chapter office-bearers) are meeting this week to chalk out a strategy regarding wooing the angry workers and leaders and those who have joined other parties,” PPP Punjab Secretary-General Nadeem Afzal Chan told Dawn on Tuesday.

“On the direction of the party chairman we will make every possible effort to bring the old guard back in their parent party,” he added.

Prominent among those who parted ways with the PPP in Punjab after the 2013 elections and joined the PTI are former state minister Samsam Bokhari, former opposition leader in Punjab Assembly Raja Riaz, former Punjab minister Ashraf Sohna, MNA Amer Dogar and former lawmaker Arif Lashari. MPA Azma Bokhari and her husband Samiullah Khan (former PPP Punjab secretary general) joined the PML-N.

Nahid Khan (the late Benazir Bhutto’s political secretary) and her husband Safdar Abbasi, who had formed a new PPP faction Pakistan People’s Party Workers (PPP-W), is also likely to be contacted by the PPP Punjab. Former PPP Punjab president Rana Aftab who has been cornered by the party for long may also be approached.

A source in the party said it was not easy for the PPP to win back those who had joined Imran Khan’s PTI. “Unless the PPP stages a comeback in Punjab, there will be little attraction for these leaders to rejoin the party,” he said. He expressed hope that the party might succeed in taking Nahid Khan and Safdar on board as they have many diehard workers with them. The couple preferred their own faction to joining the PTI.

Some ex-PPP leaders who joined the PTI told Dawn that that they had no plan to rejoin the parent party because of different reasons.

“Since Faryal Talpur insulted me, I will not consider rejoining it. I am fine with the PTI and will contest election on MNA seat (from Faisalabad) in the next election,” Raja Riaz told Dawn.

He said whenever he had to meet former president Asif Ali Zardari he was always told to contact Rukhsana Bangash (Zardari’s political secretary) and Faryal Talpur propagated against him that “I was not a true jiyala”.

Ashraf Sohna’s son Bilal Sohna said: “It’s not good to switch parties every now and then. Besides, once you leave a party, there is not much respect on rejoining it,” he said.

Safdar Abbasi told this reporter that there would be no harm in meeting the PPP chairman. “We have already asked him to purge the party of opportunists and start internal accountability and the old guard of the party will be with him,” Mr Abbasi said.

He said the PPP was a party of the federation and Bilawal would have to decide whether he had to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and mother or carry the “heavy baggage” of the party.

He said many PPP workers who faced trials during dictatorship and underwent imprisonment and torture in those regimes are now part of the PPP-W. “The PPP leadership had forgotten them but their self-esteem is intact,” he added.

Published in Dawn, November 23rd, 2016