ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Muslim League-N has vowed to dislodge the PPP-led government by January. The party believes that even if it does not succeed in doing so its efforts would not go to waste because these could serve as a platform to launch a final push before the next elections, whenever they are held.

Two key PML-N office-bearers said the party had done its homework before announcing its plan to launch the anti-government movement, but said they could not disclose its details at this stage.

“We have a lot of options and each of them will be used when the time comes,” said the party’s information secretary, Mushahidullah Khan. He said December would be crucial and that in his opinion, the party would be able to achieve its target by the first week of January.

“Definitely our target is to topple the present government,” he said when asked to explain, particularly after an earlier statement by his senior party colleague and Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, who told a group of reporters that his party did not want to topple the government.

When Mushahidullah’s attention was drawn to the opposition leader’s statement, he said “perhaps Chaudhry Sahib wanted to say that the party did not like to derail the system”.

Similarly, deputy secretary general of the PML-N Ahsan Iqbal said the party had chalked out a phased strategy for its movement. He claimed that Senate elections were not the target of the party’s movement and that they only wanted to bring the country out of the present crises. “We believe that the status quo will be detrimental for the country’s security as economic haemorrhage is very severe,” he said.

Mr Iqbal is of the opinion that the demand for early elections is not undemocratic because the people who give mandate to a government also have the right to withdraw it anytime if they feel that their problems are not being solved. He said completion of a five-year term by a government was not mandatory under the Constitution and early elections were a routine practice in democracies.

It was perhaps after realising the PML-N’s seriousness that the PPP leaders have also started making venomous remarks against the Sharif brothers. Federal Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan soon after her arrival in Lahore on Saturday said that “a psychic patient” was ruling the largest province of the country.

She advised Nawaz Sharif to get his younger brother “treated” before his condition became critical.

According to sources in the PPP, the party leadership is expected to deliberate upon a strategy to counter the opposition-planned agitation soon after Eidul Azha. For the time being, however, the top leadership had given a go-ahead signal to its hawkish members to give a befitting response to the PML-N’s invective.

The sources said former law minister Babar Awan, Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan and Interior Minister Rehman Malik had been given the task to counter the opposition moves.

It was after getting encouragement by the public protests in various Punjab cities last month that PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif, at the first meeting of the party’s newly-formed Central Working Committee (CWC) on Oct 3, gave a call to the party’s workers to join the protests against power outages and for mobilisation of masses all over the country against the government for its failure to resolve the energy crisis.

The announcement by Mr Sharif came when he found a rare consensus amongst participants that a now-or-never situation had arrived and the PML-N had no option but to go for a final push to dislodge the PPP government.

According to the sources, a number of speakers said the people generally believed that the PML-N had not played effectively its role as an opposition and it was because of the party’s wrong strategy that the rulers were “enjoying impunity to loot and plunder”.