No one to take care of Punjab yet

Punjab — the country’s largest province— is yet to get a caretaker chief minister as the committee tasked with selecting the man for the job remained unable to achieve a consensus over the issue on Monday.

This leaves one day (Tuesday) for the government and opposition legislators to select one name for the top slot before the matter is sent to the Election Commission of Pakistan to undergo the exercise.

The committee has Rana Sanaullah Khan, Mujtaba Shujaur Rehman and Iqbal Channer from the government’s side, while Zulfiqar Gondal, Shaukat Basra and Chaudhry Zaheeruddin are the opposition members.

The committee has been deliberating for days to finalise a name from amongst a list proposed by both sides.

Names of Justice (r) Amir Raza Khan and Khwaja Zaheer have been proposed by the government, while Najam Sethi and former LHC CJ Syed Zahid Hussain Bukhari are the opposition’s nominees.

After long hours of deliberations and their inability to finalise a name, the committee decided to include more names in the list and sought legal opinion on the matter.

The law department secretary along with his team of legal experts visited the committee and briefed them on how the law did not allow including new names in the list already proposed by the government and opposition parties.

A senior law department official said on condition of anonymity that the committee was tasked with finalising one name from the list proposed and they could not include new names.

“Even the election commission will finalize one name from the already proposed candidates and cannot make fresh additions,” the official added.

Sources privy to the development revealed that the PPP did not want a retired judge as the chief minister, as had been done in the Centre and other provinces as well, besides terming the government’s nominees “clearly” biased.

The government, however, has reservations against one of the nominees having contempt proceedings against him.

Talking to Pakistan Today, PPP’s Shaukat Basra said reservations had been handed over to the government side in “black and white”. “The government has nominated candidates who have an open bias for us,” he added.

PML-N’s Mujtaba Shujaur Rehman said the PPP was being unreasonable in its demands, as “we consulted all big political parties in Punjab before proposing the names, something which they [PPP] haven’t done”.

“The caretaker CM is going to look after the day to day working of the government. The people’s major concern at the point is that free and fair elections should be conducted. We will have another meeting today [Tuesday] and hopefully try to finalize a name, because we understand that all eyes are on us,” he added.

Zaheeruddin said all four names were discussed in depth and hoped that the committee would agree on a name by Tuesday.

He said talks were moving forward positively and the committee would meet again at 11am today (Tuesday).

PML-N leader Rana Sanaullah said the opposition had raised unsubstantial objections over the names proposed by his party.

He said the PML-N believed all four nominees for the post of caretaker chief minister were respectable.

The former Punjab law minister said he was hundred percent sure that an agreement would be reached on the names proposed by PML-N, as all parties, except the opposition, supported their nominees.