MULTAN, Aug 6: Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervez Elahi is scheduled to come here on Sunday (today) to what appears after going through his itinerary a mission to rout the PML-N in the district ahead of the local polls.

From the airport, he will go straight to the residence of PML-N leader and former provincial health minister Hafiz Iqbal Khakwani. Then he will move to Shujabad to meet PML-N Multan district president and former district council chairman MPA Mujahid Ali Shah and his brother, former MNA Javed Ali Shah.

Later, he will address a press conference at the residence of former PML-N MNA Sheikh Tahir Rasheed. He is also scheduled to visit Nishtar Hospital to lay foundation stone of the separate building of its dental section.

Iqbal Khakwani, the Shahs of Shujabad and Tahir Rasheed will formally announce their joining the ruling party. Although Khakwani has so far offered no excuse for disassociating himself from his benefactor Mian Nawaz Sharif, his close aides claim that he has been under pressure of being implicated in a triple murder case registered with the Vehari police. However, he has already been exonerated of the charge by the police.

Sources said that MPA Mujahid Ali Shah had been offered a slot in the provincial cabinet for floor crossing while Tahir Rasheed and his family represented the settler Rohtaki community which had large business and political interests in the urban politics of Multan city. “They have been offered top slot of a town committee of the recently-declared Multan city district government,” the sources added.

However, Tahir Rasheed’s younger brother and former Multan mayor Tariq Rasheed had denounced his brother and took oath of allegiance with PML-N’s exiled leadership before the party’s provincial president Sardar Zulfiqar Ali Khosa at a press conference here the other day.

Analysts say that the relocation of the three influential power houses of PML-N to the ruling PML will definitely tilt politics of the local bodies in the district in favour of the ruling party and will prove a serious blow to the seat adjustment struck by the ARD and MMA to field joint candidates against those being patronized officially.

In the LB polls held in 2001, Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi of PPP had become the first district nazim of Multan after defeating Haji Sikander Hayat Bosan with a thumping margin. Sikander Bosan is now the federal minister for agriculture.