ISLAMABAD – PML-Q, the second largest party in the Upper House of the Parliament, has lost majority of its seats in the Senate as more than dozen of senators, including Deputy Chairman Jan Muhammad Jamali, have retired. Before the Senate polls, the PML-Q enjoyed a strength of around 21 senators. The party president, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, will retire in 2015.
The 20 senators which have now retired also include Gulshan Saeed, Haroon Akhtar Khan, Lt Gen (r) Javed Ashraf, Muhammad Ali Durrani, Naeem Hussain Chattha, Nilofar Bakhtiar, SM Zafar, Jamal Leghari, Syed Javed Ali Shah, Abdul Ghaffar Qureshi, Sameen Yusuf Siddique, Ammar Ahmad Khan, Fozia Fakhar-uz-Zaman, Salim Saifullah, Mir Mohabat Khan Marri, Rehana Yahya Baloch, Saeed Ahmad Hashmi, Tariq Azeem and Wasim Sajjad.
Out of these 21 senators, nine were elected from Punjab, two from Sindh and seven from Khyber Pk, while another two were elected from the Federal Area (Islamabad). The two party senators from Islamabad were Tariq Azeem and Wasim Sajjad, while PMLQ Secretary General Mushahid Hussain Sayed has been unopposed elected from Islamabad after the Senate election 2012. In Punjab, from where the PML-Q had nine senators, now has been able to get just one candidate, Kamil Ali Agha, elected, while it made an alliance with its real rival PML-N to get a single seat. In Sindh and Balochistan, the Q-League supported the PPP in Senate elections.
Moreover, the two forward blocs in the PML-Q that were sitting on opposition benches have also been dissolved after the latest Senate elections. One of them was led by Senator Tariq Azeem who along with four others had formed a forward bloc against Chaudhrys’ decision to make an alliance with the PPP. The other bloc was of Senator Salim Saifullah who formed PML-Q-Likeminded.
The forward blocs opted to be in opposition and supported the PML-N. However, they could not succeed in getting representation in the Upper House with the support of PML-N.