LAHORE, Aug 5: The Pakistan People’s Party is learnt to have contacted the PML-N leadership in London last week to ‘remove certain misunderstandings’ which surfaced recently, straining relationship between the two major opposition parties.

The PPP is said to have pleaded with the PML-N that the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy must remain intact, at least until the upcoming general election.

The PPP is learnt to have sent Rehman Malik as an emissary of party chairperson Benazir Bhutto to PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif with the request that the two parties should strengthen their own alliance, instead of throwing its weight behind the All-Parties Democratic Movement (APDM), which was dominated primarily by the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal.The PPP and the PML-N developed differences during the multi-party conference held in London last month as the PPP pulled itself out of the APDM, saying it could not be part of a coalition which had a major role for the MMA. This had hit the ARD hard because six of its component parties supported formation of the APDM to launch a movement against the military regime. The remaining four ARD parties had also pulled out of the new alliance in support of the PPP.

According to PML-N sources, Ms Bhutto had also conveyed to Nawaz Sharif that she cherished the desire of returning to Pakistan along with the Sharif brothers and not alone. For this, she had consistently been pleading with forces who wanted her to come to some political arrangement with President Gen Pervez Musharraf.

The PPP’s emissary is said to have told Nawaz Sharif that the ARD would be able to ride high on political tides if they arrived back in Pakistan together.

The PML-N, according to sources, has delayed its response to the PPP, yet the party has silently started withdrawing itself from the APDM because it now wants to keep a ‘minimum liaison’ with the 30-party coalition to achieve the one-point agenda of removing Gen Musharraf from the scene. The PML-N might join the APDM rally in Rawalpindi on Aug 14, but would desist from going all-out for the APDM and the three-party alliance with the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf.

Such an impression was also cast by PML-N’s acting president Makhdoom Javed Hashmi in his news conference on Sunday, his first after his release from almost four years of imprisonment. He talked of strengthening the ARD and continuing efforts to bring the PPP back into the alliance fold.

On the other hand, the Jamaat-i-Islami and the PTI have complained about the PML-N’s ‘indifference’ to the APDM. Casting certain aspersions on the PML-N, they say the Sharifs’ party had failed to attend the Lahore APDM meeting on Aug 1 and had also abstained from the PTI-sponsored seminar to felicitate lawyers of the chief justice the following day.