Nawaz Sharif was hounded out of politics (and eventually the country) to install and keep Imran Khan in power. There is poetic justice in the idea that his return coincides with the end of Khan’s political journey.
By Ahmer Kureishi
Former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s strategy to put pressure on the government of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) coalition by walking out of the system has been scuttled – by Khan himself.
Khan is known for his U-turns, and this will certainly be among his top few. In the middle of sending his two provincial governments home, it dawned on the chairman of his own Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party that his interests would be best served by returning to the National Assembly.
Khan announced en bloc resignation of his party’s members of National Assembly after his ouster from power in a vote of no-confidence in April 2022. He has since stubbornly refused to withdraw those resignations and return to the National Assembly – until now, when he has some interests to safeguard by return.
Said interests consist in preventing Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif from reaching an agreement with Raja Riaz, the current Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly, over the name of a caretaker Prime Minister to hold the next general election.
The development came as the voters of Karachi and Hyderabad burst the bubble of Khan’s popularity in the local bodies election, putting President Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) – one of the two heavyweights of the PDM – in the lead.
Meanwhile, the ruling coalition chipped in with its own contribution to the drama by announcing the acceptance of the resignations of 70 more of PTI’s members of National Assembly in two phases, bringing the total of PTI MNAs de-seated thus to 80.
Likewise de-seated has been Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed, a staunch ally of Khan and the chief of his own Awami Muslim League (AML).
Will this apparent setback prompt Khan to return to his original strategy of walking out of the system? It is too soon to say. For now, his lieutenants are asserting Khan will contest the by-elections from all 35 seats announced vacant by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).
In other words, the hard-bargaining Khan has no viable candidates to field from any of those constituencies. What is more, he will contest for multiple constituencies once again, only to vacate them and force another round of by-elections.
All in all, it seems that in his desperate struggle to stay relevant, Khan has managed to hasten his fall into irrelevance. It is possible, even likely, that Khan’s spin doctors will continue to paint him the winner for a while, but his long overdue rendezvous with reality seems at hand.
But those are the appearances – and appearances can be deceptive. Recently, the PDM stalwarts were sure there was no way Chaudhry Pervez Elahi was going to dissolve the assembly – and he did.
The drift is that it is still too soon to write off Imran Khan as a political force to reckon with. Just as he duped the PDM earlier to whisk the Assembly from under Rana Sanaullah’s moustache, he could be at work now to lull his detractors into complacence to God knows what end.
Nor can the PDM deny that the dissolution of Punjab and KP assemblies has come at an awkward moment, particularly for the PML-N. Per some late breaking information, Maryam Nawaz Sharif is recuperating after some major surgery at Geneva and may well be out of action in the near term.
Did Khan just force a walkover in the provincial elections due in two provinces soon? Let us wait until we have word from Ms Sharif, who can still spring a surprise of her own by returning to full health sooner than Khan expects. That is PML-N’s only hope – unless of course Maryam’s father, thrice prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif thinks it is his move.
Sharif has been in the middle of a fightback of his own since at least the time the military announced its decision to pull out of politics. His return to Pakistan is overdue, not least because his return can potentially lift Pakistan out of its current multifarious predicament.
Nawaz Sharif’s cardinal sin was his stubborn opposition to generals lording over civilian leaders. Now that the generals have apparently come round to his point of view, he has every right to return in triumph.
He was accused of lying in his returns and living beyond his means. There was little doubt to begin with that the charges were trumped up, but the legal process that led to his conviction has since been thoroughly discredited.
However, while the military’s rededication to the Constitution is welcome, we have no indication that the judges are also prepared to walk the straight and narrow path.
Also, what if some of the judges and generals who trampled roughshod on the Constitution for their myopic ends in the recent past are not prepared to mend their ways?
They would be in mortal fear of the return of Nawaz Sharif, and will oppose it with all their might. Should he return in spite of their opposition, they must be determined to subject him to a new round of victimisation, the law and constitution be damned.
In fact, there have been plenty of signs in the last eight months that such characters embedded in the woof and warp of our polity are at work to resist the return of Nawaz Sharif.
One of the objects of this lot would be to maintain a hostile government in the Punjab province, which was likely why the PDM found Chaudhry Pervez Elahi such a tough nut to crack, eventually allowing him to dissolve the assembly and block the path of a PML-N led government in the province at least until the next election.
Their next object could be to leverage the judiciary to keep Nawaz Sharif down and out at least until the next general election. They must find it helpful that some of the judges who besmirched the hallowed name of justice by becoming willing pawns in the conspiracy to oust him from politics continue to be … judges.
And ironically, although exposed as wrongful, his conviction is still a conviction and can only be overturned through a judicial process involving the very judiciary that enacted his sham trial.
The drift is that Sharif must risk facing the judiciary to clear his name before he can take part in active politics once more. Does he have the emotional and physical wherewithal to go through that ordeal? Ultimately, it is for the him or his doctors to decide.
Finally, there has been little public discussion of the what Nawaz Sharif’s return will mean to the Pakistani polity, and in particular to those responsible for criminal abuse of the justice system against him.
The military’s newfound determination to stay apolitical is important, but the whole system has to be reorientated before Pakistan can move forward. To that end, there has to be reckoning for some people’s past misdeeds.
And while the return of Nawaz Sharif may look like the day of reckoning to some, there is little doubt that Sharif will be returning to Pakistan with a sheaf of pardons under his arm.
In no world do serving generals talk freely about past missteps of their institution, including some on their own watch, unless they have ironclad guarantees of amnesty for renouncing their past conduct.
Those guarantees likely came from Sharif and his top PDM colleagues President Asif Zardari and Maulana Fazlur Rehman. But a public negotiation of them will be requisite before Pakistan can move forward. And they will likely be conditional upon flying straight, and have a cut-off date.
But for all his soft talk and conciliatory tone, Sharif will be carrying the big staff of Article 6 for any not prepared to forsake the old ways. The situation is fraught and the stakes are high, but the initiative rests with Nawaz Sharif.
Paradoxically, however, his biggest threat is not returning precipitately but holding his return off until he is sure the time is right for Pakistan to move forward.
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