LAHORE: Downplaying the meeting between Asif Zardari and Dr Tahirul Qadri, the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) says it has been expecting warming up of ties between the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Awami Tehreek in the current scenario.

“Mian Nawaz Sharif had told an informal consultative meeting in Islamabad held on last Monday that Mr Zardari would make efforts to encourage Dr Qadri come out on roads against us in Punjab,” a close aide of the former prime minister told Dawn here on Friday.

Mr Sharif believed that Mr Zardari and Dr Qadri needed each other’s support like in 1998 when the two parties along with some other “non-entities” had formed the Pakistan Awami Ittehad (PAI), he said, requesting not to be named.

As a counter strategy, the aide said, the PML-N president had addressed a public meeting in Quetta on Dec 2 on the invitation of Mehmood Khan Achakzai while he is likely to meet ANP’s Asfand Yar Wali and other leaders “to show that he too enjoyed support of some forces”.

Commenting on Zardari-Qadri meeting, former information minister Senator Pervaiz Rashid said if “a politician stated to be of the stature of a university on politics seeks help from a seminary (Qadri) one could infer the situations of the two”.

He termed the outcome of the meeting “zero plus zero equals zero” saying neither of the two had anything to give each other.

Responding to a query about the timing of the PPP-PAT contacts, he said political tremors in the country were felt before Senate polls and general elections and that the masses were now acclimatized to it and could tolerate these jolts successfully.

PML-N Information Secretary and Climate Change Minister Mushahidullah Khan recalls that his party had bailed out the PPP government when Dr Qadri had camped in Islamabad in 2013 by holding an all-party conference in Jati Umra to show solidarity between democratic forces for allowing the democratically-elected government to complete its term.

Referring to Mr Zardari’s demand for resignation of Shahbaz government, he said the PPP leader had not sought removal of the party’s government when 269 innocent workers were burnt alive in the Baldia factory fire.

Similarly, he said Chaudhry Shujaat and Sheikh Rashid never announced launching a movement against the murder of Nawab Akbar Bugti, killings in Karachi on May 12, 2007 and Lal Masjid tragedy “but are trying to do politics on 10 bodies of Model Town shooting”.

He cautioned the PPP leadership that “it would lose whatever credibility was left with it by going with people like Qadri and Sheikh Rashid.”

Published in Dawn, December 9th, 2017