- PML-N leadership needs to wake up
The meeting of former PML-N federal minister Kh Saad Rafique and his younger brother Kh Salman Rafique, a former Punjab minister, with PML-Q Punjab President and Punjab Assembly Speaker Ch Pervez Elahi on Saturday at the latter’s residence should have caused tremors within the PML-N leadership. Not only are the brothers an important part of the party in Lahore and also within the Sharif brothers’ own Kashmiri clan, but their long recent imprisonment made them important symbols within the party of the resistance to the Imran Khan government, of which the PML-Q is a part. PML-N President Shehbaz Sharif has had to return from the UK to dig the party out of the hole which was being created by the ease he and his brother Nawaz were enjoying in exile in London, and where they had cut themselves off from party affairs.
The Rafique brothers were not the only party leaders to find themselves having to shoulder the burden while the leaders were away. Former PM Shahid Khaqan Abbassi and former minister Ahsan Iqbal also faced arrest, but like the Rafique brothers, were bailed out by courts which found there was no evidence adduced by the state sufficient to hold them. Shehbaz might have returned because of the covid-19 epidemic, but it is now increasingly apparent that the real reason was that followers saw no reason to continue suffering not just exclusion from the sweets of office, but actual persecution, while leaders got out of jail and went abroad. Before Shehbaz’s return, there had been an eruption in the federal parliamentary party, and then an MPAs’ meeting with Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar.
It should not be lost on Shehbaz that the Rafique brothers mentioned their elders. That oblique reference to the support given by their mother Farhat, as an MPA, to Ch Parvez, when he went into rebellion against him in 1986, might indicate that there is much ground to be covered, both by the Sharif brothers and the Rafique brothers, but there is a certain inevitability that no one can really avert.
