Sanam Bhutto agrees to enter politics?
ISLAMABAD (March 21 2008): The arrival of Sanam Bhutto in the country at this point in time has given birth to a new round of speculations. According to reports which could not be confirmed immediately, party chairperson Asif Ali Zardari is said to be making efforts to make Sanam agree to enter into politics by giving her "good reasons" for doing it.
The only living child of Nusrat Bhutto and her late husband Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sanam Bhutto, is strongly expected to contest by-election to later earn a top party or ministerial post if she is finally persuaded of her brother-in-law's plan's merits, according to well-placed Larkana, Islamabad and London-based party sources.
However, Sanam Bhutto, who arrived here on Wednesday, has given no indication whether she is pondering over new development. "She even admonished those raising slogans in her favour," sources said while referring to her visit to her farm estates in her native town on Thursday morning.
"She told the Bhutto loyalists not to mention her name in their slogans that they raise for the Bhuttos as she does not want to join politics," the sources quoted her as saying at the farm land where she spent about three hours before leaving for Karachi with her two children and Bilawal.
"Should she agree to say `yes', she will be filing her nomination papers from her ancestral NA-207 seat which remained un-contested in the February 18 elections owing to the death of Benazir Bhutto, who had filed her nomination papers from this seat," the sources said.
These sources told Business Recorder that her intervention in party affairs in particular had become inevitable because of an extremely volatile situation caused by a variety of factors. These included the on-going tiff between Pakistan People's Party co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari and senior vice-chairman and president of Pakistan People's Parliamentarians Makhdoom Amin Faheem.
"Zardari has now reached the conclusion that an announcement of the name of would-be prime minister by even party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari won't be of little effect, for the crisis, that had acquired a nasty dimension over the last five weeks, needed the most appropriate solution," the sources said, and added that "the most appropriate solution lies in the person of Sanam and that it's not as if her name just cropped up in a conversation and Zardari just went for it".
An elegant but a recalcitrant Makhdoom from Hala had played a new card by telling Zardari that he wouldn't accept anyone outside Bhutto family for this seat, indicating thereby that if Zardari could not become prime minister for some technical reasons then the party had to look for someone else from the children of the late party founder.
"Makhdoom Sahib clearly meant Sanam, not Bilawal or the children of the late Murtuza Bhutto," the sources said, adding that Makhdoom Faheem had conveyed a clear message to Zardari that the party was facing a serious prospect of a split if the latter was "adamant" that the president of Pakistan People's Party Parliamentarians be "deprived of his right".
Moreover, the sources said, the co-chairman is said to have realised that although he commanded a lot of respect in the party, he was still nowhere close to where her late wife. The vacuum created by BB could only be effectively addressed, if not fully filled, by Sanam Bhutto herself. "Naturally, it requires a lot of efforts on the part of Zardari to persuade Sanam about this proposition," the sources said.
"You are one from the family and you have to provide help to the family in crisis situations," the sources quoted some family members as telling Sanam. The sources said that Sanam, who had always abhorred politics for obvious reasons and had suffered personal losses on account of her father's and siblings' deaths, had been told by some old family sympathisers that the party founded by her father was facing a critical situation ever since her sister was assassinated on December 27 last year.
Business Recorder [Pakistan's First Financial Daily]
