Senior Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q) leader Hamid Nasir Chattha's mission to wean the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) away from the PML-Nawaz and persuade it into making an alliance with his party has failed. However, Chattha chose to deny that he was given the task by his party. “I was on no mission; I met PPP co-chairman Asif Zardari some days ago as he had invited me to dinner because of our old friendship,” Chattha, the former speaker of the National Assembly, told Saudi Gazette. PPP's leading prime ministerial candidate Makhdoom Amin Fahim also recently had a session with Chattha at the latter's residence. Chattha's effort has been to prevail upon Zardari not to trust former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, but his efforts remained fruitless, a political source revealed. Chattha has been in close touch with President Pervez Musharraf and briefing him about the “progress” of his mission. However, he said he met the president just once after the Feb. 18 elections, and that was before he had dined with Zardari. Chattha said he has not been given any assignment by Musharraf or his own party to cash in on his old ties with Zardari and other top PPP leaders. He said the PML-Q would start thinking about having cooperation with the PPP only after its alliance with the PML-Nawaz would break up following full exposure of their contradictions. “Let me make it clear that we don't want to come in the way of fulfillment of the election promises that these two parties had made at a sonorous pitch,” Chattha said. “The is our considered policy. We want the two parties to translate their tall claims into reality. They should now cut down the prices of wheat flour.” Chattha was one of those few PML-Q leaders, who had been stressing even before Musharraf for allowing slain Benazir Bhutto to return from self-exile. This was because of his excellent bond that he had with her and Zardari. He was among the few federal ministers of the first Nawaz Sharif cabinet, who had quit as part of a conspiracy hatched by the then president Ghulam Ishaq Khan in collusion with the PPP in early 1993, paving the way for the dismissal of his government on April 17 that year. At the time, the PPP had deposited resignations of its MNAs with the presidency. Since then, Chattha has never looked back to even think of going in Nawaz's party. He was elected speaker after a defiant Fakhar Imam was voted out in the eighties. He has now been named as leader of the opposition in the Punjab assembly. __
