RAWALPINDI: PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari`s recent announcement about strengthening the party in Punjab has seen the very opposite happening in the garrison city.

Several old PPP hands of the city defected to the PML-N on Sunday, with the ruling party gleefully claiming more desertions, not just from the PPP but other rival parties too.

`PML-N`s fair politics and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif`s development agenda areattracting our opponents to our party, PML-N MNA Malik Abrar Ahmed told Dawn commenting on Zafar Iqbal, the former PPP president in the constituency PP-10, and other former of fice bearers from cantonment areas in the constituency NA-54, joining the PML-N.

They announced their decision at the inauguration of Model Bazaar at Naseerabad.

Apparently, their desertion reflected old PPP workers` resentment at being ignored by their top leadership in the PPP reorganization, and its move to bifurcate Rawalpindi into cantonment and city chapters, for fighting the next elections.

A senior party leader told Dawn that Zamrud Khan did not support the local PPP leaders and activists af ter winning the NA-54 seat and getting a cabinet post in the PPP government that emerged from the 2008 general election.`Throughout the five years of the party`s rule, he failed to run the affairs of the PPP properly and dashed the hopes put in him by the party workers who just remember the period as shuttling between Zamrud Khan`s office and Zardari House in Islamabad,` he said.

Neither did their views received any attention from the PPP leadership in the recent local government elections and that of the cantonment board. Indeed, the former MNA lent support to the independent candidates.

However, while confirming the overnight desertions from the party, the Rawalpindi City PPP spokesman Nasir Mir dismissed the worrying development as `local politics`.

But, at the same time, the spokesman added the local PPP leadership would `meet the old workers and activists to end the feeling of being ignored` during its reorganization campaign in the Rawalpindi city andcantonment areas.

For the moment the party is busy in making arrangements to observe the 38th death anniversary of its founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he said.

Meanwhile, PML-N MNA Malik Abrar Ahmed sanctimoniously sings the laurels of his party. `In the PML-N, we give respect to our party workers as well as to those of other parties and carry out development works without any discrimination,` he told Dawn, pointing to the Model Bazaar at Naseerabad.

It has been constructed `to provide a permanent stall or space to cart pushers to earn their living in a respectable manner,` he said.

`Our party would soon launch Rs400 million development schemes in Cantonment areas to solve the civic problems of the civilian residents and a park at Golra Mor for the residents of Naseerabad and adjoining areas.