Politics now and later

Just a few weeks ago, Nawaz Sharif looked besieged and flailing.  While his situation remains precarious, he seems to have regained his balance, clawing back to a position of strength from the edge of precipice.

Last week, he won a mini victory when the Islamabad High Court directed the Accountability Court hearing corruption references against him and his immediate family to hear again his plea that the three references should be clubbed together. Even though the National Accountability Law and other laws allow this in routine prosecution, this plea by Nawaz Sharif, if finally granted by the Accountability Court in the light of the IHC verdict, would mean something exceptional for him.

This will contrast sharply with the general understanding of his legal position after the Supreme Court bench order that forced, against normal practice, NAB to file direct references against the family. Having deposed him from power, the Supreme Court bench decision looked to have closed all legal options for Nawaz Sharif. It pushed him under the tight deadline of an unprecedented six-month-long trial under the hawk eye of a supervisory judge. Now if he gets this ‘relief’, it will strength his argument that the Supreme Court verdict skirted due process of law only to deliver a pre-determined judgment – his ouster and his family’s legal banishment from politics.

Both the IHC and the Accountability Court have suggested through their last week’s judgments that something isn’t right with the way the Sharif references are proceeding, and that room for correcting them exists even after the Supreme Court bench’s tight and narrow directions.     This is an opening of sorts for the Sharifs in the realm of law that had started to choke them tightly.           

None of this gets Nawaz and family off the hook. They continue to face corruption charges. Whether these are clubbed as one or are proceedings in three different courts has no material effect on the trial itself. In fact, the trial can proceed swiftly and more reasonably in one court rather than being spread in three. However, the timing of this small victory is of immense importance. It has coincided with Nawaz Sharif’s arrival back from London where his kitchen cabinet had earlier decided to field Shahbaz Sharif as the next prime ministerial candidate in case their party wins enough seats in the coming elections.

After this decision, the frenzy in the media about the Muslim League factionalizing has calmed down. The suggestions have also disappeared from the national debate that 30 to 50 odd Muslim Leaguers are ready to part ways with Nawaz Sharif. There aren’t many party members suffering convenient fits of conscience like the one that seized Mr Peerzada a week or two back, and made them discover the immorality of Nawaz Sharif facing corruption charges and still heading the party.

More to the point: Nawaz Sharif’s frontal attacks against the powers-that-be have also been turned down. His wails and cries of being thrown out without reason (as he describes it) hold the field, but he does not point to ‘hidden hands’ and dark conspirators who engineered his judicial ouster. His tenacious daughter, Maryam Nawaz, continues to breathe fire but is much more controlled than before, both in her tweets and her statements. However, she has built such a terrible reputation among the movers of shakers of this country that even her ordinary remarks appear like boulders of hate.                    

But, undoubtedly, a ‘propaganda’ restraint regime has come into effect.

There appears to be more acceptance of the fact in the Nawaz Sharif camp that his march of defiance was a momentary lapse of political reason which the party cannot afford to relapse into at present. This understanding has been reinforced by immense family pressure. Maryam Nawaz’s denials of family rift and her outpouring of ‘niecely’ love for Uncle Shahbaz aside, the new generation of the Sharifs has serious issues between themselves. Some are inevitably related to dominance of the political field by Nawaz Sharif and Maryam Nawaz. Others are connected with the fact that Shahbaz Sharif’s sons have built huge business empires in Pakistan and unlike Nawaz Sharif’s family, whose riches are all abroad, the cost of political loss is too large for them to bear.

For Shahbaz Sharif, his elder brother’s outbursts of anger and his Bolshevik-like zeal to storm the palaces of the establishment’s power, could mean the end of his dream of becoming Pakistan’s prime minister. Shahbaz Sharif has invested long years in cultivating good-neighbourly relations with Pindi, his elder brother’s target-in-chief. That has been done with the sole purpose of         creating protection for himself in case the chips are down for the Sharifs. To him, Nawaz’s confrontationist bent is suicidal – and purposeless.

On the latter part of Shahbaz’s concern (the purposelessness of Nawaz Sharif’s pursuits), there is now consensus in the party. This has come about also because most of the senior members including Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Saad Rafique and Khawaja Asif, agree to the idea of peaceful – even if awkward – coexistence with reality. Ishaq Dar’s plight and pleas and Chaudhry Nisar’s constant refrain of restraint being the best option for the party have cemented the idea.

But these overtures would have been of no use if there were no takers from the other side of        the table. In one of her statements, Maryam Nawaz recently posed a rather fraught question: those who are talking about an NRO – exemption-from-cases deal that ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto had with the ex-military ruler Pervez Musharraf – should answer this: who is the other party in the NRO? The reality is that she knows, and so do Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif and their families and all the intermediaries deployed to calm things down with Pindi.

She is right that there is no NRO but it would be factually incorrect to say that there is no new understanding to hold back the fire and create more space for a resolution of the present political turmoil that has functionally impaired the whole country.

There seems to be a realisation on the other side that Nawaz Sharif is becoming a beneficiary of his trial. His appearances in court and his tales of victimhood have thrown him a lifeline which is sustaining him through crisis. Already the haste through which the Supreme Court bench acted has made the subsequent legal proceedings against the Sharifs look hollow and motivated. It was a rare judgment. It divorced itself from regular legal practices in an attempt to speak to the popular mood in the street but ended up being the most controversial one since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging judgment.

In brief, if the effort was limited to getting Nawaz off the screen of national politics by using the channel of law, this has not happened. He is more on air now than ever before, with considerable if not fancy ratings.

All this is happening when Election 2018 is approaching fast. ‘Nawaz the victim’ is a great story to tell during election times; ‘Nawaz in jail’ is an even better poll poster.         For Nawaz now to be out forever, the scenario has to change. It can change only if his party breaks up, the next elections are manipulated and Imran Khan – who remains chained to his follies – is bolstered. Something like the Pak Sarzameen Party happening in the treacherous lands of Punjab can take a very long time, with all its faltering and sputtering. More ominously, such a development may inevitably precipitate direct military intervention. This would be a path to nowhere except rocky abysses.

If this realisation is there on the other side of the political fence then last week’s developments may see a middle course open up to resolve the current crisis. Nawaz keeps the uneasy calm, faces the cases that may linger on for a while and the next elections are held to produce a fairly mixed National Assembly. However, in between today and this scenario taking shape lie many difficult miles.   The most difficult of them all is the Senate elections, when the Muslim League – using its present majority – wins total domination, placing itself in a position to change any and many laws in the constitution. Something or the other seems likely to happen to prevent that from happening, wrecking the calm that this country so badly needs.

The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.

Email: syedtalathussain@gmail.com

Twitter: @TalatHussain12