Cracks in Coalition

PML-N is hard-pressed to keep the alliance intact as smaller parties press for unmet demands

ISLAMABAD: Despite having constituted the largest federal cabinet in Pakistan’s parliamentary history, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is finding it hard to keep the partners in the ruling Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) alliance happy and satisfied.

The latest threat of quitting the fragile alliance has come from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P). It has warned that it will quit the government unless its reservations on the fresh delimitation of constituencies ahead of the upcoming local bodies’ elections in Karachi and Hyderabad are addressed.

Earlier, the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP), the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) and the Balochistan National Party-Mengal had threatened to cause an upset over the signing of a fresh agreement on Reko Diq with a Canadian mining company which they said amounted to the negation of provincial rights enshrined in the constitution.

Senior Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leaders say that some alliance partners are resorting to such “unreasonable” demands because the government is over-dependent on their support. As a result, the control of the prime minister over his cabinet also remains shaky, affecting performance of the government, they say.

They expressed fear that ultimately it will be the PML-N, which leads the current government that will pay the price for poor performance on both the administrative and economic fronts.

Political analysts say that the PDM is an alliance of parties that have different ideologies and differ with each other on various issues that require a wider consensus to be handled efficiently. This, they say, is one of the major reasons why the government is failing to deliver on issues of immediate concern.

An assistant professor at Islamabad’s Capital University of Science and Technology (CUST), Naeemullah Khan, says the administrative control of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif remains weak because he has to appease all the partners in the alliance. This somewhat anarchic situation is reflected in the fact that he has included more than 70 parliamentarians in his cabinet, making it the largest-ever in the country’s history, he said.

Sources in the PML-N told Bol News that due to its razor-thin majority in the parliament, the party was facing the brunt of the government’s continuing troubles with a failing economy and bad governance.

“The coalition partners tend to blackmail the government even on petty issues, and the prime minister has to strive to meet their demands so as to prevent the government from falling,” said one PML-N source. “This will have a negative fallout on the future politics of the PML-N more than any other party in the alliance.”

Political analysts say the problem started when the PDM was moving a no-confidence motion against the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government. In order to get support for the motion, the PDM accepted even those demands of the smaller groups such as the MQM-P, the BAP, the BNP-M and the JWP of Shahzain Bugti which they now find hard to fulfill.

Sources in the PML-N say that they did fulfill almost all the promises they had made with these smaller parties. The problems started when one of the major parties in the alliance, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), became increasingly reluctant to fulfil some of the demands of MQM-P, they say.

However, one senior parliamentarian said that the chief of his own faction of Balochistan National Party, Sardar Akhtar Mengal, is also annoyed with the government for not honouring the commitments made with him. Although Mengal has not quit the alliance, neither is he a part of it any more, he said.

According to this parliamentarian, the problem is that Akhtar Mengal’s demands are mostly linked to the activities of the security agencies in Balochistan province, a matter which has traditionally remained beyond the control of the civilian governments. He admits, however, that Mengal was given assurances of relief at the time of the trust vote.

Similarly, Mohammad Aslam Bhootani, an independent parliamentarian from Balochistan, is also uncomfortable with the ruling alliance and has expressed his differences on the floor of the National Assembly.

Meanwhile, the rift between MQM-P and PPP over the issue of the upcoming local bodies’ elections became serious when the urban Sindh based party openly threatened to quit the government if its demands were not met.

To break the impasse, a team of federal ministers belonging to PML-N, including Rana Sanaullah, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq and Khwaja Saad Rafique, rushed to Karachi and have held meetings with the leadership of both the MQM-P and PPP. But deadlock on the issue still persists.

The MQM-P has been pushing for fresh delimitations of constituencies in the lower Sindh region before the second phase of the local bodies’ elections is held there. But the PPP, which is in power in Sindh province, says that since the election schedule has been announced for 15 January, delimitations and updating of voters’ lists will not be possible.

PPP leader, Qadir Mandokhail, said that issues such as delimitations and holding or postponing of elections falls in the jurisdiction of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), not the Sindh government.

When contacted for his comments, former secretary ECP, Kunwar Dilshad, said that once the election schedule is announced, then neither the voters’ lists can be updated nor can fresh delimitations be done. The MQM-P’s demands can be met if the ECP postpones the elections, which it doesn’t seem prepared to do given the delays caused in its schedules by recent rains and floods.

As things stand, the PML-N is struggling to keep MQM-P as well as BAP in the alliance as the withdrawal of their support will bring the coalition government down.