Representing PML-N at tough time: Abbasi, Ahsan, Sanaullah – the three odd men out

ISLAMABAD: Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Rana Sanaulah and Ahsan Iqbal are three odd men out amongst the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leaders, who haven’t held their horses despite imprisonment.

Breaking with the practice of some of their colleagues, these three stalwarts are straightforward, no holds barred and candid in offering their opinions and views on political matters as they had been doing before being jailed. As far as the PML-N is concerned, they have turned out to be the main critic of the present government, portending the spectre of their confinement once again.

The primary objective behind their incarceration was to remove them from the political scene so that PML-N is deprived of eloquent, dauntless leaders to represent it at a time when it is confronted with a host of monumental challenges and pressures and was fighting for its survival to remain a vibrant political entity.

Abbasi, Sanaullah and Ahsan Iqbal hold the top offices of the PML-N with the one being its senior vice president, the second being the president of its Punjab chapter and third being its secretary general. Even in the presence in and absence of Sharif brothers from Pakistan, they have been the real face of the PML-N, propounding its policies.

When these leaders were behind bars, the PML-N’s parliamentary leader in the National Assembly Khawaja M Asif has mainly been running the show in the Lower House of Parliament. He is facing a host of inquiries in the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) but has, so far, not been arrested.

Rana Sanaullah was the first one to get bail from the Lahore High Court (LHC) in the drug smuggling charge framed by the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF). After a few weeks, former Prime Minister Abbasi and Ahsan Iqbal, apprehended by NAB, were bailed out on the same day.

Since their release, all the three leaders have become active in projecting the party’s strategies as before. When Nawaz Sharif is seriously ill, getting treatment in Britain, and PML-N President Shahbaz Sharif is staying put in London to look after him, the entire responsible of running the party has come on the shoulders of Abbasi, Sanaullah and Ahsan Iqbal. Contrary to their approach of following the same old but risky trajectory, there are some PML-N leaders, who have preferred silence after they were granted bails by high courts. They were very aggressive, belligerent prior to their detention.

“I was kept in a solitary confinement in a death cell for more than four months; I rule out the possibility of a national government and in-house change; all stakeholders should sit together and take a decision within the ambit of the Constitution for holding a free and fair election which is the only solution to getting Pakistan out of the chaos created by the failures and incompetence of the government, which is literally not functioning; the economy has collapsed; and the government is victimising the opposition and making false cases in a futile exercise of diverting the attention of people from its mis-governance and mismanagement,” Abbasi has stated.

PML-N Vice President, Maryam, daughter of ailing deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, conspicuously figures among the party leaders, who stay unspeaking after they were given bails by high courts. There was a time when she was virtually the name of the PML-N with her father and uncle, Shahbaz Sharif, and several other party frontrunners being jailed.

However, her activities saw a remarkable downturn with the demise of her mother, Begum Kalsoom. “After departure of my mother, I have been left with only my father. I can’t compromise on his health; politics would go on all my life, but one can’t get one’s parents back once they are gone. At the moment, his health is most important for me and I cannot leave him alone for a moment due to his critical condition,” Maryam once remarked, giving a clear message to keep politics aside for some time.

Much before she got bail from the LHC in November last year in the Chaudhry Sugar Mills case being investigated by NAB, she was nonexistent on the political landscape. Senior PML-N leaders are in no position to say when Maryam will become active again. For now, her first preference is to get LHC permission to go to London to be with her father. The government is determined to block her departure to Britain.

Shahbaz Sharif though not silent since his bail has not been as vibrant in politics as he is expected to be by his party’s rank and file. The primary reason is his lingering stay in London.

Former Finance Minister Miftah Ismail is also quiet after the IHC bailed him out in December last. Before his arrest by NAB, he was quite energetic in TV programmes by commenting on the economic situation. Hanif Abbasi, who used to be an assertive guest is also silent since his bail in the drug case in which he had been imposed life term by the lower court.