ISLAMABAD, April 20: Senior Pakistan People's Party politicians would be heading for Dubai next week not to hear their leader but American political researchers.
Dawn has learnt that PPP chairperson Benazir Bhutto has called her lieutenants to attend a presentation by the researchers of the International Republican Institute (IRI) of the ruling party of the United States on April 29.
It will be the third such presentation to Ms Bhutto by the IRI, a research wing of the Republican party of the US, based on their findings of surveys conducted in several cities of Pakistan to ascertain political trends.
Those who have been invited by Ms Bhutto for the IRI briefing are senior Vice-Chairman of PPP Syed Yusuf Raza Gillani, Secretary General Jahangir Badar, Raja Pervez Ashraf, party’s Punjab president Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi, former Punjab president Qasim Zia, Senator Safdar Abbasi and a member of the PPP Foreign Liaison Committee, Palwasha Behram.
Sources said that soon after receiving the briefing from the IRI team, Ms Bhutto would leave Dubai for the UK and then to the US where she would spend almost a month.
IRI representatives earlier made a power-point presentation before Ms Bhutto and her team last year on December 10. Before this, they had made a similar presentation before Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) chief Nawaz Sharif in London. However, according to a source in the PML-N, Mr Sharif rejected the IRI survey and unlike Ms Bhutto did not show any enthusiasm on its findings.
During their presentations, IRI representatives told the two former prime ministers that President Pervez Musharraf was more popular in Pakistan than either of them, according to the survey conducted in September last year. Interestingly, both PPP and PML-N leaders decided to keep silent over the findings.
Later, when the media reported the findings of the survey, the PML-N leadership categorically rejected it while PPP leaders tried to prove that Ms Bhutto's popularity had improved if compared to the last survey conducted by the IRI.
The sources said a senior analyst from the US would brief PPP leaders about the latest findings of the IRI survey with the help of computer slides.