WE the Punjabis have never excelled in the art of associating together to pursue the common good. A few relevant cases described below may be of interest.

An unceasing quest for dominance destabilised the Punjab Muslim League and its government within weeks of the country`s establishment. On Aug 16, 1947 Nawab Mamdot, the party`s provincial president, became the chief minister. Mumtaz Daultana, one of the party`s leading men, was taken as a minister in his cabinet. He did not think much of Mamdot`s standing as a landed aristocrat or his abilities as a politician and administrator.

By the end of December the estrangement between the two became widely known and began to create factional divisions in both the administration and the party organisation. Mr Jinnah twice summoned them to Karachi to resolve their differences but his efforts failed. The governor, Sir Francis Mudie, also tried to bring about a reconciliation between them but he too failed.

Mumtaz Daultana resigned his cabinet post in June 1948. In November he ran for the party president`s office against Mamdot`s nominee, Alauddin Siddiqui, and won by a small margin. He proceeded to campaign for Mamdot`s removal as chief minister and got a little more than one half of the party`s MPAs to sign a statement demanding his resignation. Daultana sent word of this statement to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and advised him to dismiss the Mamdot ministry.

Liaquat Ali Khan came to Lahore in January 1949 and Mamdot showed him a statement signed by a majority of the MPAs expressing confidence in him. The prime minister noticed that the names and signatures of several MPAs appeared on both statements.

Instead of asking the governor to call the assembly to session to show whether Mamdot had majority support, he advised the governor general to dismiss the Mamdot ministry, dissolve the assembly, and impose governor`s rule in the province.

The Punjab Muslim League council met on July 24, 1950 but the meeting turned chaotic. Mian Abdul Bari, its president at the time, failed to restore order and left the meeting along with Mamdot and their supporters. Daultana and his supporters stayed on, dismissed Bari and elected Soofi Abdul Hamid, a Daultana nominee, as president. Despondent, Mamdot left the Muslim League and set up a party of his own called the Jinnah Awami Muslim League.

Provincial assembly elections were held in March 1951 which the Punjab Muslim League won with a landslide and elected Daultana as the chief minister. He got the position for which he had resorted to manipulation and intrigue for four years. His dominance in the PML and the government in Punjab would, however, last only a couple of years.

Following the elections of 1970, Punjab emerged as the stronghold of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the PPP. Ahmad Raza Kasuri, one of the party`s founding members, denounced Bhutto`s decision to stay away from the National Assembly session scheduled for March 3, 1971. He tried to set up a faction within the party but eventually left to join Asghar Khan`s Tehrik-i-Istaqlal. Mukhtar Rana, a militant socialist and effective labour leader in Faisalabad, criticised Mr

Bhutto`s `fascist` inclinations. He was sent to prison on a charge of inciting violence and, allegedly, died under torture.

Fist fights between PPP factions were reported from several Punjab towns as far back as May 1972. Higher party dignitaries were by no means above factional rivalries. Sheikh Rashid, one of the venerated party elders, was president of the Punjab PPP while Ghulam Mustafa Khar, known to be close to Mr Bhutto, was the secretary general. He, being the domineering type, did not want to work with Rashid who was popular with many of the party leaders and workers. At the beginning of 1972, Khar became Governor of Punjab but retained his party post.

Khar as governor had influence with the provincial police and controlled some of the government patronage. He used these levers, and his reputation as Bhutto`s friend, to harass and dislodge Rashid`s supporters. By May 1973 there was hardly a party branch organisation in Lahore that had any pro-Rashid functionaries.

In a party `reorganisation` in the summer of 1973, Sheikh Rashid lost his position and a Khar nominee, Mohammad Afzal Wattoo, one of the few PPP candidates to have been defeated in the 1970 elections, replaced him. Thus Khar emerged as the effective head of both the government and the party in Punjab. But as in the earlier case of Daultana, his glory would be short-lived he was forced to resign his post in March 1974.

Coming to more recent times, we saw Shahbaz Sharif and the PML-N members in his cabinet asking the PPP ministers to go away. They argued that since the PML-N had withdrawn from the PPP-led government at the centre, the PPP ministers in Punjab should be nice guys and reciprocate. This was poor reasoning. Nawaz Sharif withdrew his men from the central government because he was unhappy with Asif Zardari, who had gone back on his promise to reinstate the deposed judges. But the PPP ministers in Punjab were not unhappy and had no reason to quit their posts.

It would have been proper for Shahbaz Sharif to throw out the PPP ministers if they had been particularly corrupt or incompetent, or if they had been obstructionists in cabinet meetings. But none of that was alleged. The real reason for the PML-N`s demand has never been revealed. I venture to suggest that it may have been something like the following

As the recently reported settlement between the two sides tells us, the PPP ministers wanted their share of development funds and jobs, and they wanted their advice concerning the postings and transfers of officials in their areas to be heeded. This would have shown their constituents that they were doing a good job for the folks back home and would incline them to vote for the same aspirants in the next election.

Shahbaz Sharif and company did not want these PPP politicians to win next time. They wanted to replace them with their own people who would use funds and jobs to ingratiate themselves with the PPP`s current voters and defeat that party`s candidates in the next election.

In other words, it was the PML-N`s design to drive the PPP, its main rival, out of Punjab. It is good that eventually wiser counsels prevailed.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts.

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