By Muhammad Najeeb, IANS
Islamabad : Pakistani opposition parties are expected to make major gains in upcoming elections in the wake of mass anger sparked by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, a political expert said Tuesday.
The elections, scheduled for Jan 8 but which may be postponed in view of the violence that followed the former prime minister’s killing, would also hurt the outgoing Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q), said analyst Humayun Gohar.
The PML-Q has supported President Pervez Musharraf since he took power in a bloodless coup in 1999.
According to Gohar, the major gainers in the elections would be Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which he said was bound to get sympathy votes, and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).
“I believe PPP will get more seats than it expects,” Gohar told IANS.
He said Sharif, who along with Bhutto returned to Pakistan late last year after long years in exile, would also do well in the polls. The PML-Q, he said, would be the major loser.
Almost all political parties have been highly critical of Musharraf and his policies. They have said that voting for PML-Q would amount to voting for Musharraf.
Sharif, otherwise an arch foe of Bhutto, reached the Rawalpindi General Hospital minutes after she was brought there Dec 27 following the fatal attack at the end of an election rally.
There, an emotional Sharif won many hearts when he set aside long-time political rivalry to tell anguished PPP activists that he saw Bhutto as a “sister” and that he would be with them in their hour of distress.
He was also the first non-PPP leader to lay a floral wreath on her grave despite the fact that since 1985 he had been highly critical of Bhutto and had initiated criminal cases against her.
In his first press conference after the assassination, Bhutto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari came down hard on PML-Q calling it the “Qatil (murderer) League.”
In a letter to Musharraf, Bhutto had said she suspected PML-Q leader and prime ministerial candidate Pervez Elahi and four others to be responsible for the attack on her homecoming rally in Karachi Oct 18 that killed 140 people.
On Monday night, in an interview with Pakistan Television, PPP leader Shah Mahmood Qureshi thundered: “Pervez Elahi is a murderer and he is behind Bhutto’s killing.”
PML-Q election offices were the major targets of angry PPP workers after the assassination. PML-Q election banners and posters throughout the country were destroyed by rampaging mobs.
PML-Q is a breakaway faction of PML-N that sided with Musharraf when Nawaz Sharif’s government was overthrown in October 1999. Most of the mainstream PML-Q leaders were members of Sharif’s cabinet.
Meanwhile, PML-Q candidate in Nankana Sahib, Rai Mushtaq Ahmed, has defected to PML-N.
PML-Q is the only party that has demanded that the elections be postponed. It said most of its election offices have been destroyed and that its candidates were getting death threats.