THE just concluded by-election in Jhelum is remarkable for the milestone it marks in the journey of a gentleman known as Fawad Chaudhry. He lost by a few thousand votes in a result that will be contested for long. The 70,000-odd votes he secured, however, would indicate a revival of sorts for him and his ‘influential’ family.

Fawad belongs to a family of politicians and professionals in the legal fraternity. For many years, he has been agitatedly moving in various spheres and parties, as if looking for an identity, and more than that, striving to re-establish lost moorings.

Fawad Chaudhry has been located as a vocal member in the Gen Musharraf camp. His well-wishers at the time reminded him that ultimately he would have to return to the party his elders, most prominent among them the one-time Punjab governor Chaudhry Altaf Hussain, had chosen to side with for long.

The young man, who appeared to favour a career in politics over a promising stint at the bar, was destined to land in the PPP which his uncles had represented in Jhelum. The inevitable happened and Fawad managed to get a low-key role as an adviser to prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

What Jhelum predicts is that the pace of alliances between the PTI and old families of influence is going to pick up.

Then the second inevitable event followed. Fawad Chaudhry moved closer to Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. This trajectory was to ideally take him away from the legacy of what the committed jiyalas often wish to dismiss as the pre- Bilawal PPP.

There was a whole series of statements that saw this ambitious politician, trying to reassert his family’s presence, commit himself to the ideals BBZ apparently had in mind. He would have wanted to get the PPP nomination for the 2013 general election, but then Asif Zardari had decided to bank on some other ‘electable’ from Jhelum. Zardari preferred Raja Afzal, thought to be a prize defection from the PML-N, over the old loyalist Chaudhry Altaf family.

In the 2013 polls, two members of the Chaudhry family contested two National Assembly seats from Jhelum on PML-Q tickets. Of them, Chaudhry Farrukh Altaf, son of Chaudhry Altaf, might have been a more willing bearer of the Q banner than his cousin Chaudhry Fawad.

Fawad managed to get around 34,000 votes in the contest and on the day of the polls friendly television analysts made little effort to conceal that they expected him to spring some kind of a surprise. Yet, the margin between his tally and of the PML-N’s nominee was huge and offered vast room for reflection. Not to forget that while the PML-N candidate got more than 110,000 votes in that contest, Fawad was also easily outdone by the PTI man in the run who secured more than 42,000.

All this meant that the search for a reasonably good banner to take on the might of the PML-N was going to be a long one. The subsequent events proved that Fawad and his family were able to adjust to the reality much better than so many families of old influence in Punjab. The role of the television anchor that Fawad found for himself next did help immensely.

He was one of the more outspoken critics of the PML-N in his bold transmissions. At the same time, his messages on television and social media forums gave him the reputation of being a liberal — something that was supposed to have been reconfirmed in the mind of old-fashioned observers by his open and at one time frequent allusions to Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. It was this image which raised some questions when the PTI and Fawad Chaudhry decided to team up with each other for an important by-election in Jhelum.

It all started with the death of the famous and very popular PML-N member from NA-63, Raja Iqbal Mehdi. Suddenly, there was an opportunity for the PTI to gauge not only its own standing in upper Punjab where the PML-N has traditionally been strong, but also for wooing a big influential family from the area, given the fact that Imran Khan’s primary focus at this stage is on the general election in 2018.

Chaudhry Fawad fit the requirement perfectly provided that he had come out of the fantasy world where he imagined to be led to salvation — in this case political relevance — by BBZ flying on the back of some kind of a magic horse. It is assumed that a keen political aspirant, as Fawad had himself realised by now, had to increase his options to increase his family’s resurgence in the local politics of Jhelum. Just in case there was any thought about the liberal leaning that the young man had been so proudly been flaunting those minor issues must have been overcome by the family’s collective demand for the absolutely essential correction of the course.

For his part, the PTI nominee in NA-63 tried his best to convince everyone that he also had the PPP’s blessings for the contest. This despite the fact that the PPP had its own candidate in the race. Whether or not the claim was true is difficult to say: the PPP got around 1,000 votes which is what the party may actually be worth in light of its present condition.

What Jhelum predicts is that the pace of alliances between the PTI and old families of influence is going to pick up. The clamour that the PTI is finding good candidates in Fawad Chaudhry in Jhelum and Ayesha Jatt, who almost knocked off a PML-N man in a provincial assembly by-election in Vehari, is not without reason. It gives some hope to PTI against the mighty PML-N. This is an inescapable fate for a large number of Chaudhries in the vast Punjab fields. It is going to be about power tomorrow. Today, it’s just about staying relevant — as desperate as that.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2016