NAWABZADA Ghazanfar Gul has quit. Firdaus Ashiq Awan is out, having finally been extended the refuge she had been long petitioning PTI chief Imran Khan for. And as these two departures are accompanied generally by two entirely different sets of reactions from whatever remains of the jiyala camp across Punjab there are others in the province who are sitting on the edge. The PPP is melting away in the heat generated by the warring armies of the PML-N and PTI.

The PPP continues to shed its members — losing them faster now as the election year approaches. Each crossover is greeted by a hoarse chorus about a prediction coming true, about Asif Ali Zardari’s ability to allow the party during his command to shrink drastically. Each one of these departures is also marked by the sighs of jiyalas about a promise that could not be fulfilled, a promise that, even if briefly, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari appeared to signify of somehow reinventing the outfit. He faded out and moved into the background, before he was actually put in charge of the party.

These switching of the flags are essentially dictated by local politics and a desire not just to be relevant but to stay alive in politics. It is reported that Mr Zardari had himself tried to convince Ms Awan to not go, even though she seemed to have lost all interest in doing politics from the PPP’s platform. As far as consolation prizes go, Ms Awan’s delayed exit from PPP could well be credited to Mr Zardari’s most celebrated powers of not easily losing a person he had admitted to his as yet mysterious inner circle.

The PPP continues to shed its members — losing them faster now as the election year approaches.

The politician from Sialkot has already won quite a name for herself for being in the right party at the right time. She had in the past shrugged off the PML-Q label without too much ado. Without meaning it to be any kind of a judgement on her politics in a country where party-hopping is routine, she should have actually left the PPP a long time ago — when PPP leaders had ignored her advice to adopt a combative mode against the PML-N in Punjab.

It can be said in her defence that having made her declaration during one of these harmless brainstorming sessions at the Bilawal House a couple of years ago, Dr Awan stood her ground until the tide took control of her, sweeping her away towards the PTI. She simply moved on.

She will have every reason to believe that the deafening cries around her that strive to condemn her as a stigmatised politician just out of a corrupt party will die. Her plus is that she has not been around for long enough to be ‘sufficiently’ and irredeemably involved in and accused of corruption on the scale of what some others, most notably, her former PPP colleagues, are believed to have indulged in.

For all she was worth for the PPP in these trying times, Dr Firdaus Ashiq Awan was not what you would call an old jiyali ditching the mother organisation. She was very much a product of recent years and could be dubbed as an out and out representative of the PPP’s Zardari era. She was not amongst those who could claim to have pre-existed the PPP’s decline and disintegration after the death of Ms Benazir Bhutto in 2007.

That honour belongs to others, prominent among them Nawabzada Ghazanfur Gul, who you might have noticed in recent times trying to wake up the slumbering spirit of the PPP by breaking into a bout of bhangra at a party event. The nawabzada from Gujrat makes it a point to lay bare his dilemmas as he moves away from the PPP after a three-decade-long association, and come closer to the PML-N where his family had already landed.

The transition is most powerfully marked by pictures that Mr Gul has been flashing on his timeline — of himself with Benazir Bhutto and a caption expressing a deep sense of respect and trust for the assassinated leader. Then the scene changes and there appears on the screen a very recent image of the man whose family has been a salient player in Gujrat politics for long and championed the anti-Zahoor Elahi family interests in the area for many years. This time the lines speak of an old friendship between Mr Gul and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

This whole process in which Mr Gul is shown to be undergoing an unavoidable change is meant to capture the agony of a political worker in — forced — transition. He does appear to be in considerable pain as he paces closer to a formal entry into the PML-N — after failing to convince the PPP leadership to change its style of politics.

There are, of course, remarks that bemoan his decision ‘to shift loyal ties’ at this stage of life. There are indeed suggestions that it is always better to call it a day than escaped your political identity for a new one, that too, an identity as vivid as that worn by a proud jiyala.

There are, finally, inescapable comments which describe the move as one required by family interests. This debate will continue, and it would help our understanding of the issues if we were to keep in mind this political worker’s attempts at staying in the PPP after Mr Zardari decided to hand over Gujrat to Messrs Shujaat Hussain and Pervaiz Elahi before the 2013 election. That started the rot that has since then eaten deep into the party the current PPP leadership inherited from the now universally revered Benazir Bhutto.

The images of a BB lieutenant, of a very awami variety, slipping into Mian Sahib’s camp could have caused much protest and chest-beating a few years ago. The occasion does not cause quite as much grief now. The PPP is almost done and it is only natural that survivors are trying to find new ground, an entirely new basis, to stand upon. To many, Mian Nawaz Sharif should be considered more a BB successor than an old rival.

The writer is Dawn’s resident in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, June 2nd, 2017