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Party pins hopes on Kulsoom Sharif

ISLAMABAD: Demoralised by the ease with which the government managed to send its leader Nawaz Sharif into exile, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) is now looking to his wife Kulsoom to provide leadership to the party in his absence.

Eight years ago, Ms. Sharif won admiration for the manner in which she mobilised people against her husband’s arrest in the days after he was deposed by Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Political observers believe she may be successful in mobilising party workers to keep alive Mr. Sharif’s case for returning to Pakistan.

At the moment, the party is coming to terms with its failure to bring out activists and sympathisers in large enough numbers, if not to overwhelm the security forces at the barricades around the airport meant to keep them out, at least to register a presence on the streets of the capital.

That failure was once again apparent in its inability to mobilise workers for Tuesday’s strike call.

But as the media remarked on the absence of the promised “sea of PML (N) activists,” party leaders blamed the government’s security measures, the choice of venue for Mr. Sharif’s arrival, the last minute change in his flight schedule, and the reluctance of its religious right wing friends in the All-Parties Democracy Movement, to mobilise their own workers.

Mr. Sharif’s admission that he had an agreement with Saudi Arabia to go into exile, albeit for five years and not 10 as the government was saying, is also said to have affected party morale.

All through Sunday, the party leadership asked workers to reach the airport by 9 a.m., two hours ahead of his scheduled arrival from London by a Gulf Air flight. At the last minute, Mr. Sharif took a PIA flight arriving in Islamabad at 8.45 am, which some party leaders said threw workers into confusion.

Other Opposition leaders are saying that had Mr. Sharif landed in Peshawar, where the opposition MMA is the ruling party, federal authorities would have not been able to send him back so easily.

Even Lahore, which is said to be a Sharif stronghold, would have been a better choice, observers said.

There is also talk that the Muttahida-Majlis-e-Amal, the coalition of Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamiat-e-Ulema Islami, held back from mobilising their cadres mainly made up of madrassa students.

One reason is that the JUI leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman may not have his heart fully set on opposing President Musharraf, although he has denied many times that he would readily join a Musharraf-Benazir combine.

The JUI’s failure to bring out its cadres is being blamed on Mr. Sharif’s admission last week that he had an exile deal with Saudi Arabia.

This is also said to have had a demoralising effect on the workers of the PML (N).

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