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| He’s definitely hurting, but is Zardari learning as well? |
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Thursday, November 05, 2009
By Rauf Klasra
ISLAMABAD: Apprehending fresh opposition moves against him, a worried President Asif Zardari has reportedly been quietly conferring with some party confidantes from Sindh both to get a clue about possible opposition strategy and to preempt any such fresh moves now that he has laboured his way out of three tight situations including judges reinstatement, restoration of Punjab government, and the latest dumping of the NRO. But has he really learnt the right lessons from these experiences, remains the moot question.
According to one of the involved Sindhi MNAs, the president was still far from convinced about abolishing the 17th amendment and handing over certain key powers back to the prime minister. He added that the president was fully cognizant of the stormy political ramifications of his refusing to do so, and was in fact mulling over the pros and cons of dealing with any such eventuality. Knowledgeable sources claimed that the president’s mannerism suggested to the select group of politicians that as the president of Pakistan and party chairperson of PPP, he believed that he had successfully repulsed the first well calculated attack of the opposition parties since he became the president last year after PML-N and PML-Q gave him a mafia style “surprise” in the shape of betrayal of MQM at a very critical juncture. The sources said, the meeting of the parliamentarians, also attended by Chief Minister Sindh, Syed Qaim Ali Shah, had originally been summoned days earlier to discuss the strategy of NRO’s passage from the parliament but when the meeting was held, the NRO had already been dumped and so its agenda was changed to that of figuring out and thwarting opposition’s possible future moves against the president. The sources told that President Zardari was keen to know from these Sindhi politicians the possible next move of the joint opposition parties, whose inexplicable sudden alliance coupled with MQM’s flight from the ruling nest hit him hard on the NRO issue.
The dramatic MQM’s flip flop has caused serious concern in the presidency which is desperately trying to unravel the players behind the “palace intrigue” to get rid of Zardari in the name of “saving the country first, than democracy”. The sources said that this was the first time that president Zardari had taken the threats to his presence in the presidency seriously after MQM betrayed him as in the past he never gave any serious thought to reports of such “palace intrigues”. Rather he had developed a strategy to let opposition whip up a storm against him on any particular issue and then defuse the issue by yielding to their demands. The sources said, this is what he has done exactly in the case of restoration of judges and Punjab government and now he conveniently dumped the NRO to defuse the tension for the time being.
The sources said, this time serious worries had gripped President Zardari as what to talk of MQM’s betrayal, he was not even anticipating a direct attack from PML-Q as in the past he had been holding secret meetings with Ch. Shujaat Husain and Pervez Elahi and had developed a fairly decent understanding with them.
The sources said, these secret meetings with Chaudries of Gujrat had given more benefits to the besieged cousins from Gujrat who were being hounded by a vengeful Shahbaz Sharif after initially attempting implicating Moonis Elahi in the Punjab bank scam and some other cases. Sources claimed that certain top guns of PPP had orchestrated the escape of former Bank of Punjab President, Hamesh Khan from Peshawar airport despite his name being on the exist control list in a bid to dump the possibility of any action against Moonis Elahi in the light of Hamesh Khan’s statements in the expected scenario of his becoming an approver. But the sources said, now when the testing times came for Zardari and he needed these cousins to return the favour, Pervez Elahi was seen launching lethal attacks on NRO along with Ch. Nisar Ali Khan in the parliament on Monday. The sources said, for President Zarari, MQM was not the only party to ditch him in testing times, but he was also not expecting strong opposition to NRO by Pervez Elahi as Mr President had been hosting many late night dinners for the two cousins.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
