A senior Lahore-based journalist, who has closely watched political developments in Punjab for the last three decades, points out that Imran Khan had intentionally not groomed anyone from his party for the job of Punjab’s chief minister. “His party didn’t promote any specific candidate who would replace Shahbaz during its campaign for power in 2013 and 2018. In my view, Imran Khan realised that the day he announced his candidate for the post of Punjab’s chief minister, the party would lose all its popular momentum and might as well break up. So he deliberately kept his options open until his ascension to power.”
According to him, none of the PTI leaders such as Aleem Khan, Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Aslam Iqbal — who were often discussed by the media as potential candidates for the coveted position — were ever given any signal by Imran Khan; they were mostly wild guesses by the media. “Buzdar represents a new experiment in Punjab,” the journalist believes. “It is after almost 45 years that we have a chief minister who comes from south Punjab and the first who does not have any links with the urban industrial business community and the middle class from central Punjab,” he says. “Also, he is the first chief minister who was not groomed politically under Gen Ziaul Haq. Buzdar is more like the Wyne experiment.”
RAINY DAYS
Imran Khan’s relentless support for him notwithstanding, Buzdar has been under a cloud ever since his election as the 26th chief executive of the province. Seen as an unassuming, modest and quiet person who is forced to work under the shadows of Shahbaz Sharif, whose development model for Punjab had endeared him to very large sections of the urban population, Buzdar has always been at the centre of media speculations about his looming departure.
One TV anchor after another and one columnist after another has predicted Buzdar’s imminent downfall. His own party colleagues are not happy with him and consider him an ineffective manager, ill-equipped to handle the Punjabi bureaucracy the way Sharif did. They also complain that he does not listen to legitimate complaints of his party’s legislators, let alone redress them.
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He has not only survived this onslaught of speculative attacks but also managed to throw out people like his media adviser Shahbaz Gill — Gill had tried to exercise his boss’s executive powers — and keep rival Aleem Khan, who could prove a threat to him, out of his cabinet. Of course, Buzdar could not have pulled this off if Imran Khan had not lent him his unflinching support.
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