Courtroom, newsroom, drawing room — everyone loves to hate him. And that’s what the angry Jamshed Dasti is looking for. Mr Dasti finds it hard to convince everyone that he survived on his MNA’s salary. His opponents point to the big office he maintains in Muzaffargarh and the 30-odd cases against him for crimes ranging from extortion to murder. He denies these allegations and is now contesting in Muzaffargarh after an election tribunal overturned his conviction in a fake degree case.

The son of an amateur wrestler and the owner of a still modest house, Mr Dasti first came into the limelight back in the late 1990s. His identity was Shahwani, a Muzaffargarh one-man weekly where he worked as the editor-cum-hawker. By the 2000 local government polls, he had cultivated his links sufficiently to be elected a nazim on a seat reserved for farmers. Mr Dasti immediately hit out at the district nazim, the Musharraf-backed Sultan Hinjra.

A vivid memory of that period is a procession taken out against Mr Hinjra, with Mr Dasti at its head, of donkey carts. It was during those days that he earned himself the nickname of ‘One-Five’ — the people of Muzaffargarh used to say he was always just one call away.

In the 2005 local government polls, he tried his luck on a general union council nazim seat, and won. The PPP’s Qayyum Jatoi, who was the district nazim, took him under his wing and groomed him politically to such an extent that he beat Mustafa Khar and his brother in the race for a PPP ticket for NA-178 in the 2008 elections.

The PPP claimed all five National Assembly seats in the district. Mr Dasti beat the Nawabzada duo, Mansoor Khan and Iftikhar Khan, from a constituency not unknown for electing minnows. The party rewarded him with the office of the chairperson of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Sports.

Although a treasury member, Mr Dasti had to look for a new Hinjra to vent his by now dreaded spleen on, and stay in the media’s spotlight. He found one in everybody’s favourite punching bag, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, Ijaz Butt. During his three years as the standing committee chairman he grabbed headlines with hard-hitting statements against Mr Butt, riding the wave of popular sentiment against corruption in the country’s cricketing ranks. Another constant target of Mr One-Five’s ire was Dr Asim Hussain, given general anger against frequent hikes in petrol prices.

Mr Dasti’s innovative Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Free Bus Service in his constituency was the most talked about such initiative in Punjab politics before Shahbaz Sharif’s more elaborate Metro Bus Service. Again, like the expenses for running his spacious office and the money for the bus service were claimed to have come from supporters.

Whatever situation he found himself in, Mr Dasti would somehow manage to paint it as a landmark in his fight against the well-entrenched. Thus, the highlights of his career include a brawl with Faisal Saleh Hayat in the National Assembly. Consequently, Mr Dasti the parliamentarian was barred by the speaker from taking part in the assembly proceedings for three days, but Mr Dasti the politician who had perfected his style on the dust-laden roads of Muzaffargarh was visibly boosted.

This closeness to the soil won him the by-election he was forced to contest after his disqualification by the court over a fake degree. After his second coming, though, Mr Dasti appeared to be an increasingly frustrated soul. His eventual exit from the PPP was preceded by a phase where he acted as the champion for the deprived by going after Hina Rabbani Khar, a fellow PPP MNA from Muzaffargarh with feudal roots. He now intends to have an independent panel for the election in his home town. In the true tradition of shifting loyalties, he is a man up for grabs.