Yet another Muslim League

The post-Independence Muslim League has split up so often - almost exhausting the letters of the alphabet that have to be added as suffixes to notify the new-borns - that the Q-League dissidents' party-leadership election on Thursday did not make it to the front pages. Nor, were their speeches so stirring as to win more than a two-column inside space in any of the national dailies.
But their meeting did throw up an unmistakable signal that the political storm, raised in the wake of the iconic ouster of a durable dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, is still swirling about the corridors of power. On the face of it, there is hardly a thing to suggest that the PML-N's first-ever National Assembly walkout, as protest against Prime Minister Gilani, was connected to the newly formed PML (Q-R).
(The R is for Real - if you please - the epithet that stands for the dissidents' claim of being the genuine and real Muslim Leaguers.) But if one sees it in the backdrop of the recently reported contacts between the Sharifs and the dissident leaders, one would detect some early contours of an emerging political scenario in which the battlelines are being drawn afresh. No wonder then that the members who constitute the anti-Chaudhrys 'Forward Bloc' in the Punjab Assembly had put up high visibility at the meeting of the dissidents.
Frankly speaking, the various post-Independence Muslim Leagues never ever flaunted any serious pretence of being ideological entities; they would come into being to serve certain purposes dear to the Establishment and would generally relish in carrying out their assigned missions. So to the extent that the newly-born Chattha-headed Muslim League is trying to drive the Chaudhrys from the political arena, that is understandable. That it wants to shed its past as Musharraf's collaborator, which too is fine.
But it hardly makes sense that Chattha should be using that meeting as platform to make a high-pitched call asking the United States to leave the region - unless one believes that in doing so, he wants to resonate a popular sentiment and that his newly-born PML(Q-R) would like to be part of the anti-government forces. What he plans and how he plans; for the zigzag politics that Hamid Nasir Chattha has practised for almost three decades, it is next to impossible to predict his motive.
And as for throwing the Chaudhry cousins out of politics, the Chattha-headed Muslim League faction has very limited potential. Of the PML-Q's 54 MNAs and hundred-plus MPAs, not more than a dozen turned up at the meeting, which gave birth to the new faction. That is a measure of the dissident leaders' numerical strength. Being that lightweight in the legislative houses, the new PML(Q-R) has obviously very little bargaining value, except for the Forward Bloc in the Punjab Assembly. But that too is now a spent force; if at all it has any relevance, it is with regard to PPP-PML (N) equation, which is of no serious concern to the Chaudhrys. As against this, the Chaudhrys have found their feet back on the ground by closing ranks with the MQM.
It may not be inappropriate also to point out that Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain once said that "after elections, he can think of joining the PPP-led coalition". Conceded, there is lot of truth in the dissidents' protestation that the PML-Q has become the Chaudhrys' fiefdom. But is it not the case with other main players like the PPP and PML-N. More importantly, the dissidents need to dry-clean their past as collaborators of General Musharraf and wait till the public accepts them as properly cleansed. Humayun Akhtar's merely saying "We could not apologise at that time, as our hands were tied" is certainly not enough.