The circus at the Governor’s House might be over, but things are still far from certain in Punjab and there’s no telling if the chief minister will really be able to get the budget through the house. For now, though, all eyes are on the by-elections for the 20 vacant seats that are due in just a few weeks. Headlines indicate that PPP and PML-N have been able to iron out their differences after Hamza Shahbaz’s meeting with Asif Zardari, but there’s enough chatter to suggest that things are not so smooth. The biggest problem, as in all political wheeling and dealing, is that a fair number of the party rank and file is going to be pretty upset when party tickets go to former PTI members that stood by them during the last few months. Yet it’s not as if the party leadership can make promises to help bring down a government, get that done, and then back out of its commitments. Nor can it let those down that did not defect when everybody was getting onto the PTI bandwagon, even though staying meant certain defeat and jumping ship promised much better things at that time. The friction with PPP is still pretty fresh as well. If the two have decided to work together because this is just one more front where they are faced with the PTI-PML-Q duo, it does not mean that their own differences over ministries, etc, are over. This means that there’s still too much uncertainty in the most important province for business to proceed as usual. And the budget is a good time to ponder over the fallout of such paralysis because nothing suffers quite like the economy when the senior most politicians can do nothing better than fight over the spoils. *