The Making of the President
One does not have to be clairvoyant to predict that barring a major upheaval, natural of man-made, the next President will either be a PML person or a PML nominee from one of the smaller provinces. Less than two days before the filing of nominations, the PML leadership has yet to declare the candidacy of what should have been a certainty in the minds of the PML hierarchy, given their happy position as regards the game of numbers. Being a democratic party heading a “rainbow” coalition of smaller, regional parties, one assumes the PML hierarchy is leaning over backwards to ensure that their partners do not feel left out of the decision-making process, articulating their preferences and given suitable advice as to who would make a good President. The concept of a Federation requires that the smaller provinces must play an active part in the coalescing of consensus, democracy enjoins that the voices of all the constituent units be heard and taken into account.
PML has no party leader from Balochistan for the Presidency, the only person having some credibility being Zafarullah Khan Jamali but till very lately he has not shown any great political consistency with the mainstream PML. Balochistan at least finds representation through the Deputy Chairman of the Senate and Sindh has the National Assembly (NA) Speaker’s Sarhad has nothing. Therefore, the province having the greatest claim for representation among the ruling hierarchy is Sarhad. There is a lobby that feel that the post of Speaker NA is not enough for the Sindhis and that to assuage Sindh’s qualms there should be a President from Sindh and that in return Sindh should leave the NA post for Sarhad. The factors thus taken into account in the making of the President are, viz (1) whether the potential candidate to be supported be from Sarhad or Sindh? (2) whether a credible PML nominee is available from Sarhad? And if so (3) whether it makes sense to move the NA Speaker to the Presidency and find a suitable NA Speaker from Sarhad?
