Chakwal is no ordinary place. It has gifted one PM to India, Manmohan Singh, while its sister-district of Jhelum has gifted another, I K Gujral. If I were to name other prominent Indians from this area, the list would be long.

I once asked a group of Chakwali generals why they weren’t saying a word against the cement mafia which appeared determined to ruin the pristine splendour of Choa Saidan Shah. One of them agreed with the implied suggestion that they lacked the guts to do so, adding for good measure that one Urdu-speaking general was worth three or four of their kind. Lt Gen (rtd) Abdul Majeed Malik has been an exception to this rule. He entered politics, contested elections, made it to the inner councils of the Nawaz Muslim League and became a minister in successive Nawaz Sharif governments. His political career set him apart from the usual run of Chakwali generals. But his joining the Q League and deciding to play the army’s game when Nawaz Sharif was ousted from power in Oct 99 showed that he too had not strayed far from the Chakwali tradition of playing it safe.

Now General Malik has landed himself in a soup. Always known for subtle calculation, Malik couldn’t have got it more wrong this time. Far from owning him, the Punjab chief minister, Pervez Ellahi, disowned him by declaring one Chaudry Ghulam Abbas as the Q League-supported candidate for district nazim. Abbas was the incumbent nazim — a vociferous Musharraf-supporter and, perhaps equally to the point, close to the cement mafia. The President’s Camp Office apparently saw no reason to displace him.

Suspicious timing which, together with the earlier rejection of Malik’s matric certificate, gives a fair idea of how these nazim elections are being conducted, especially in Punjab and Sindh, the two provinces whose chief ministers — Pervez Ellahi and Arbab Ghulam Rahim — are taking no chances.

The United Front comprising the PML-N, the PPP and the MMA had decided that it would support anyone who stood against the Q League’s nazim candidate. Malik being the only one in the field, the only option before the United Front was to support him.

The PPP component led by Sardar Nawab Khan kept assuring the UF that it stood by its collective decision. So it was a bit surprising when Nawab slipped over to Abbas’s side. Pir Shaukat of Karooli was also part of the UF until one fine morning it emerged that his brother, Pir Sajid, was Abbas’s nominee for Tehsil Nazim Kallar Kahar. Given Shaukat’s colourful career, there were few surprises. Hoping to get a provincial ticket from the Q League in the 1990 elections, Shaukat was disappointed when Malik chose someone else. He contested those elections from the platform of the PML-N. Now he and his brothers are back in the Q League.

Is any justification left for Gen Malik to stay in the Q League? Lesser mortals might think not but, whatever happens, his nephew Tahir Iqbal will stay as a minister in Shaukat Aziz’s cabinet and be a Q League candidate in the 2007 polls.

Ayaz, a columnist for Dawn, writes for THT from Islamabad