LAHORE: With the nominations of party candidates for the Senate polls, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz has sprung into action for bagging all the seats from Punjab in the upper house of the parliament.

MNA Hamza Shahbaz, son of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, has been made focal person for coordination and an organised electioneering for the Senate.

Soon after the nominations on Wednesday evening, Mr Hamza began contacting members of the Punjab Assembly, the electorate, through “all possible means”, a close aide of the MNA, who also looks after the party by-election campaigns and certain development projects, told Dawn on Thursday.

“He (Hamza) is contacting each and every party MPA on telephone to minimise chances of any defections during secret balloting for Senate election and assuring them of resolution of their complaints, if any,” the aide said.

It was considered necessary after the leadership made some unexpected decisions while awarding party tickets, he added.

Another purpose of the coordination, he said, was to guide the MPAs on how to poll their votes to win all the seven general seats from the province.

The polling is scheduled to be held at the Punjab Assembly on March 3.

Responding to a query, the aide said the party ticket for Farooq Khan had been withdrawn because the industrialist from Faisalabad had declined to give up his Canadian nationality as dual nationals were not allowed to run for any public office in Pakistan.

About the dual national status of two other ticket-holders – Zubair Gul and Shaheen Khalid Butt – he claimed that they both had applied in the UK and US, respectively, for surrendering their foreign nationalities about two weeks ago and hopefully their cases would be decided within next couple of days.

He won’t reply when asked if this could be inferred from their decision of surrendering their respective foreign nationalities that they had been assured of party tickets weeks ago, while the parliamentary board for the purpose had been formed only two days back (on Wednesday).

Meanwhile, a PML-N source has claimed that some of those awarded Senate tickets used their foreign connections, particularly officials of the countries considered close to Islamabad these days, to influence the party leadership.

Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2018