ISLAMABAD: As general elections draw nearer, and pronouncements from the military and the judiciary making them surer, the political parties in the run have got busier seeking possible electoral allies.
But the most significant of such efforts by the leaders of the centre-right PML-N and the ultra-conservative JUI-F last week produced just a promise to “cooperate”, not an electoral alliance.
Leaders of the two parties appeared beaming at a press conference after their talks but stopped short of saying they reached a firm electoral agreement.
Their second rankers, however, confided that had agreed to “a seat-to-seat adjustment” in the contest.
Though recent opinion polls have projected the PML-N as the leading choice of the electorate, the party chief Mian Nawaz Sharif is said to be worrying, like many others preparing for the electoral fight, that the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI) may still prove a spoiler with its rallying cry for ‘Change’.
“Maybe concentrated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the JUI-F can be the best bet for us as the two parties will benefit from each other's voting strength across the country,” a senior PML-N leader who was present in last week's parleys told Dawn.
After all, Maulana Fazlur Rehman's JUI-F has presence throughout the country, which the PML-N can tap to neutralise Imran Khan's country-wide scattered vote bank.
Similarly, JUI-F could benefit from the PML-N supporters in its fight against the PPP in its Khyber Pakhtunkhwa stronghold, he argued.
For example, he said, the Maulana who had earlier won the D.I. Khan NA-24, lost the seat to the PPP's Faisal Karim Kundi in the 2008 election. In NA-15 (Karak), the winning JUI-F candidate had a PML-N candidate as the runner up. Similarly, in NA-10 (Mardan), the PML-N’s candidate was not far behind the JUI-F candidate's win with a margin of only 5,000 votes.
Those instances made it obvious to the PML-N leader that constituency-based adjustments would be to the benefit of both the parties.
“If we have this fear of Imran Khan queering the pitch for us in our battles with the PPP and its coalition partners in our stronghold of Punjab, the JUI-F too faces similar odds in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In fact, Maulana Fazlur Rehman said so in his talks with Mian Nawaz Sharif,” he said.
If the recent polls put the PML-N ahead in Punjab, they also found PTI chances rising in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa from where JUI-F won five of its seven National Assembly seats in the last general elections, he reminded.
PML-N's official spokesperson, Senator Mushahiddulah Khan, called the meeting of the leadership of the two parties in Lahore “quite fruitful in terms of finding common ground” but suggested that a formal agreement can be reached only after the election schedule is announced. Electoral alliance, particularly for seat-to-seat adjustments with like-minded parties was quite a tedious job and would be undertaken once the schedule was known, he said.
It is well known that the PML-N's so-called core team has been painstakingly studying the voting patterns in past elections to work out the electoral math for individual constituencies and choose the most promising candidate for the coming contest.
A member of the team told Dawn that the party leadership had been talking to Jamaat-i-Islami also but found the party undecided about its future political allies.
“Surely, the JI, with its devoted followers, can be useful to the PML-N, if the two come to some arrangement,” said the member who is considered a strategist in the game.
Sharing the details of a recent meeting of the leaders of the PML-N and the JI in Lahore, he said, the JI chief Munawar Hassan did realise that a divided vote bank of the opposition parties would help President Zardari and his allies come back to power.
Some in the JI leadership, however, take the PTI of Imran Khan as their natural ally. Imran Khan has visited the JI's Mansoora headquarter in Lahore several times, and even formally offered the disciplined right-wing party electoral alliance.
“The JI seems looking for a better deal. If it chooses to join hands with Mian Nawaz Sharif it will have a limited number of seats on offer, whereas it can rightly hope for many more from Imran Khan's PTI being a new, unsure entrant in the election arena,” said the PML-N strategist.
One reason that the JI has not been able to make up its mind, is the untested electoral history of the PTI, despite the pollsters’ rating the PML-N's chances as best.