With Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan claiming that former foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi would announce that he is joining the PTI at a public meeting on November 27 in Ghotki, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Nawaz Sharif is going all out to keep Qureshi away from the PTI and mutual friends are being pushed to attract him to the PML-N, Pakistan Today learnt on Friday. Khan recently said in a talk show that Qureshi would be announcing his decision to join the PTI at the public meeting in Ghotki.
Interestingly, Qureshi has opted to remain silent over his future ambitions and with the date of his Ghotki public meeting approaching, he has left for Dubai to keep analysts guessing. “Qureshi is an old friend. We haven’t met as yet but we’ve spoken over the phone and will meet very soon,” Sharif had told reporters at Sukkur airport on Thursday. PML-N sources claim that the meeting will be held on November 22, however no one was ready to confirm the meeting on the record. A PML-N source told Pakistan Today that his party chief thought Qureshi joining the PTI would give a huge boost to Imran Khan’s party, which would further dent the diminishing popularity of the PML-N and the only way to stop Qureshi was to use personal contacts. However, the source said further that there were irritants in Qureshi’s way into the PML-N and the biggest of those was Makhdoom Javed Hashmi. “Both Hashmi and Qureshi are arch rivals and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and Javed Hashmi were working on an alliance on both constituencies of the National Assembly falling under Qureshi. Gilani wants to field his brother or son in one of the constituencies while the other would be decided by Hashmi. This is also in the knowledge of Qureshi and he had conveyed his concerns to Shahbaz Sharif in his last meeting,” said the source.
The source said that Qureshi was also mulling over reviving his own faction of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and he had also contacted PPP-SB leader Ghinwa Bhutto, urging her to field her daughter Fatima Bhutto against the Zardari-led PPP. However, the source said Ghinwa had dropped the proposal.