HABITUAL turncoats, or lotay, as they are derisively referred to in Pakistan`s political parlance have long been a central feature in Punjab`s politics. Men and women of little substance, they are instrumental in creating crises where there are none, making and breaking both political parties and governments, providing political legitimacy to military dictators, and so on.These political `rolling stones` have featured prominently in every election cycle since 1988 and every party national, regional or fringe has been more than willing to embrace them. The current election cycle is no exception: turncoats dominate the candidate rosters of nearly all politicalpartiesin the running, and in constituencies where parties have found stronger candidates, the rolling stones remain in contention as independents.

`The phenomenon of [candidates] changing party affiliations in the run-up to an election is, in fact, mundanely fa-miliar to anyone even vaguely acquainted with Pakistan`s electoral politics,` columnist Umair Javed, who teaches at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums), wrote in an article for Herald in 2018.

Lota-ism is neither a recent trend, nor one confined to Punjab alone. A prominent lawyer from Lahore, Sheikh Mohammad Alam, was perhaps among the first politicians to be conferred the ignominious title in the early 1930s. He had a penchant for changinghispoliticalloyalties quite frequently: he hopped from the Khaksars to the All-India Muslim League, AllIndia Nationalist Party, Indian National Congress and Majlise-Ittehad-e-Millat. The label stuck with his name, and he is still remembered as `Alam Lota`.

Indians too are quite familiar with the phrase `Aaya Ram Gaya Ram`, which originated in 1967 in Haryana, where excessive political horse-trading, counter horse-trading and counter-counter-horse-trading triggered several rounds of political defections by serial turncoats over the span of a few weeks, resulting in the eventual dissolution of the Haryana Legislative Assemb-ly and fresh elections in 1968.

The Wattoo gambit Although the term existed in the vernacular, it entered popular political parlance following the mass defection of provincial Muslim League legislators in Punjab, back in 1993. The events that took place in the Punjab Assembly on April 25 of that year are still viewed as a `watershed moment` in the chequered history of Pakistan`s parliamentary democracy.

The fateful day was preceded by a week-long frenzy of political wheeling and dealing, centring primarily around Manzoor Wattoo`s manoeuvres to win over a majority of Pakistan Muslim League (PML) lawmakers andreplace then-chief minister Ghulam Haider Wyne.

Wattoo`s power grab had been triggered by the April 18, 1993 dismissal of the first Nawaz Sharif government in Islamabad, by then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan, on charges of corruption.

The motive behind Wattoo`s move was to `steal` Punjab from Nawaz ahead of national assembly polls, scheduled for July. As many as 151 out of around 220 PML lawmakers in a house of 248 deserted the party, voted out Wyne, and installed Wattoo in his place.

The Sharifs and their loyalists could only watch.

This happened in their hometown, where Nawaz had previously frustrated an attempt by Punjab`s landed nobility to dislodge him through a vote of no-confidence during his first stint as provincial chief executive following the party-less elections of 1985; the same city where he had bought or won the loyalties of a large lot of independent lawmakers to successfully thwart the PPP`s lacklustre efforts to form a government in Punjab in 1988.

Further drama unfolded during the session to elect Wattoo.

Lawmakers threw chairs, shoes, glasses, microphones and paper-weights at one another amidst loud chants of `lota`.

Those scenes inside and outside the Punjab Assembly would be reenacted 29 years later with equal intensity, if not more during an election for the chief minister`s slot on April 16, 2022; days after more than two dozen PTI legislators switchedpolitical allegiance and abandoned their party`ssinking ship to support Hamza Shehbaz`s bid against Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi.

Wattoo, however, couldn`t hold on to his `migratory birds` for long.

Once the Supreme Court restored the Nawaz government at the centre on May 26, many of the deserters returned to its fold. The PML promptly announced plans to bring a no-trust motion against the wily politician from Depalpur, who had served as speaker of the provincial assembly three times since 1985. The rest, as they say, is history.

The PML had, by then, split into two new factions: one led by Nawaz and the other by Wattoo in Punjab and Hamid Nasir Chattha at the centre, following the demise of its president, MohammadKhan Junejo.

Inlessthanthreeyears, Nawaz would once again embrace Wattoo after the latter fell out with both Chattha and his coalition partner, the PPP, which had helped him getelected as chief minister after the 1993 polls.

Nawaz received Wattoo in the same hall of his Model Town resi-dence, where he had once warned him of the `unimaginable fate` that awaited him.The motivation to forge a fresh alliance with Wattoo, who still had a couple of dozen provincial lawmakers on his side, was to securethe premature removal of the second government of their common enemy, Benazir Bhutto, with the aid of the powerful mili-tary establishment.

Benazir was eventually sent home in November1996 by her own party man, then-president Farooq Leghari.Forming the `king`s party` This wasn`t the last time Punjab`s `rolling stones` would ditch Nawaz. Mian Mohammad Azhar, once a close associate of Nawaz Sharif, had fought and won elections from Lahore before getting the Punjab governor`s office. He fell out with his leader over his resignation during the 1993 crisis. The decision cost Nawaz his grip over Punjab, preventing him from snatching the province back from Wattoo through a vote of no-confidence or imposition of Governor`s Rule, despite the reinstatement of his government at the Centre.

The failure greatly helped Nawaz`s opponents who, encouraged by President Ishaq Khan, deepened the political chaos in the country, precipitatingearly polls in October.

Later, Gen Pervez Musharraf, who ousted NawazinacoupinOctober 1999, would use Mian Azhar and convince other PML-N stalwarts like Abida Hussain,Khursheed Mahmood Kasuri and Fakhar Imam to abandon their party and form the PML-Q, which came to be known as `the new king`s party`.

The PML-Q was to support Musharraf`s military rule and say `yes sir` to all his political ambitions.

By the time the 2002polls were held, constituency-based dynasts from across Punjab had parted ways with the Nawaz League in droves.

They nocked to the Q-League, thanks to theconnections of the Chaudharys of Gujrat, who had by then pushedMian Azhar into the backgroundandtakenoverthe reins.

The next exodus from the PML-N would come just before 2018, when some N-Leaguers ditched Nawaz because of political compulsions, others due to thepressurebroughtupon them by powerful quarters. Most joined Imran Khan`s PTI, which was the establishment`s new favourite horse. It did not surprise anyone when scores of PML-N lawmakers from across Punjab resigned and announced they would contest the July polls on a PTI ticket, even before a caretaker set-up was installed in the country.

`Patriots` Being the largest political party in Punjab since the early 1990s, the N-League has seen more episodes of mass desertion than others. It was part and parcel of the political engineering done by the powers that be as they refined their experiments to control democracy and civilian governments.

However, others, like the PPP and PTI, have also seen their fair share of rolling stones.

Take Faisal Saleh Hayat, for example. He was appointed federal minister in the first Benazir government and a senior minister in Punjab (as part of a deal with PML-Jinnah under the Wattoo administration)during her second stint.

Nonetheless, he was instrumental in breaking away several PPP lawmakers elected in 2002 to form the `PPP-Patriot group` that supported Musharraf. The groupfirst forged an alliance with the PML-Q and later merged with it. Hayat then returned to the PPP once the Q-League had outlived its utility, while most of its other dynastsreturned to the PML-N between 2008 and 2013.

More recently, he was taken back by the Sharifs as they tried to negotiate difficulties finding `electables` in Jhang for their 2024 campaign.

Likewise, Imran Khan welcomed the influx of strong, electable dynasts from different parties, especially N-Leaguers, into his party before the 2018 polls, when he sought to form the government.

Many of these same turncoats later helped the PDM remove him through a vote of no-confidence in 2022. Some later parted ways to join the two new parties carved out of the PTI: the Istehkam-i-Pakistan Party (IPP), led by former PTI financier Jahangir Khan Tareen in Punjab, and the PTI-Parliamentarians (PTI-P), headed by Pervaiz Khattak in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The `king` of Dadu While the feudals of rural Sindh also have a history of siding with the victor, one leader who stands out as a serial turncoat is former chief minister Liaquat Ali Jatoi.

Liaquat Jatoi is the son of Abdul Hameed Khan Jatoi, a man known for his nationalist views and principled stances. However, the apple has apparently fallen quite far from the tree, as he has managed to side with anyone who has emerged as a dominant political force, across the decades.

Once considered the `king` of politics in his hometown of Dadu and undefeated in elections from 1998 to 2007, he started his political career as a member of the 1977 assembly, and was also part of Gen Ziaul Haq`s Majlis-i-Shura.

In 1997, he joined forces with Nawaz Sharif and landed the coveted slot of Sindh chief minister, apparently due to the good offices of Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and Sheikh Rashid, who were both considered close to his elder brother, former Senator Aijaz Khan Jatoi.

Then, after Nawaz was exiled following the 1999 coup, he joined Gen Pervez Musharraf`s regime in the 2000s and served as afederal minister in the Zafarullah Khan Jamali and Shaukat Aziz cabinets.But this association cost him dearly when, following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, he faced a public backlash, with his Dadu residence being torched and cases being lodged against him, his family, friends andsupporters.

In 2009, he formed the Sindh Awami Ittehad, and later joined the PTI in 2017, the year before they won the general elections. But since he was considered close toJahangir Tareen, he was supposedly side-lined at the behest of Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Haleem Adil Sheikh when the sugar baron fromLodhran quit the party.Then, in the wake of May 9, Mr Jatoi also parted ways with ImranKhan and joined the Grand Democratic Alliance, which now looks to challenge the PPP hegemony in the province.

Party-less roots Politicians become turncoats to remain on the right side of power. In almost every democracy across the world, politicians leave parties to form new ones or join other, older ones. So why is it that the Pakistani brand of this phenomenon is deemed so ethically repugnant? It is probably due to the fact that it weakens political parties and strengthens individuals, who can sway electoral results without regard for party policy, manifesto or ideology.

Analysts say the roots of this phenomenon lie in four main factors: the nonparty elections held in 1985, weak and ineffective political parties, weakening of parliament by successive military and civilian leaders, and allocation of discretionary development funds to national and provincial lawmakers.

Badar Alam, a journalist and political analyst, is of the view that the partyless elections of 1985 allowed two types of candidates to emerge: those who could canvass on the basis of sectarian and religious identities, and those who had money, muscle and/ or the backing of a large number of constituents on the basis of kinship, caste or clan networks.

The electoral culture that came into being during the 1985 election made it impossible to mobilise voters without throwing some goodies at them. Money became an essential part of how an election campaign is run.

Most people who were still doing ideology politics did not have money, and those who had the money were interested not in ideology but in becoming members of parliament to enjoy the spoils of power.A detailed version of this article can be accessed on Dawn.com