What must be

If the last fortnight or so contained small seeds of hope that the current political crisis may be winding down a notch or two, more recent developments seem to have tipped the balance in favour of more confrontation.

Cornering Nawaz Sharif and him hitting back hard now seem to be the only two dynamics at work. In the Marxian sense, this ‘sharpening of contradictions’ should be just fine: this is how you get results. Stalemates never conclude, and this government has been stalemated, along with the whole system of governance and planning, for years now. So if there is a decisive duel building up, let it come. Enough of this slow death, this Victorian melodrama, this hide and seek, this game of cat and mouse. This farce. This tragedy. What is to be must be.

Two significant developments point to this worsening of tensions and expansion of      crisis. One, the release of the detailed judgment in the Panama Case review petition filed by the Sharif family. And two, formation of the Supreme Court bench, to be headed by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, on the Hudaibia Paper Mills case. The two decisively frame the legal battle that is set to choke Nawaz Sharif. The judges who authored the detailed review petition judgment have left nothing to imagination. Their bent of mind oozes out of every word they penned in this hugely important and controversial document. When justices practically call a petitioner a fraud, a liar, a swindler, and hold him and his family responsible for looting the nation (the caravan, poetically put), you don’t need thick jurisprudential glasses to see if the scales of justice are evenly poised. This bent legal process will lead to Nawaz’s conviction – and that of his family members. Only a miracle can save him from that end-result, given how the justices have placed themselves on this case.

The Hudaibia Paper Mills Case is now before a bench whose head has declared his hand clearly on all matters relating to the Sharif family. If this case restarts for probe and prosecution, Nawaz Sharif along with his brother and the family, will have their political bones crushed. Not that the case is airtight. It has big holes in it. Since when have an illegal regime’s arm-twisting methods become legitimate processes that free courts should take their results seriously? Ishaq Dar’s confessional statement is a product of the Musharraf system’s draconian tactics. Even if what he has stated is fact, coercion leading to confession destroys the legal validity of it. However, these are not the times for legal proprieties and finer debates. It is war and everything that demolishes the Sharifs is fair. In the Hudaibia Mills Case, layers of scandalous accusations of money laundering have developed for almost 17 years. These are so thick that a guilty decision will automatically resonate as just deserts.

At any rate, marketing anything that is anti-Sharifs these days is easy. There is the media, the mandarins, and the maniacal passion of the Sharif opponents, which, when combined with the low rankings of the Sharif family on the financial probity index, can make any negative verdict stick. Nawaz and family getting a jail term will be big national and international news but not necessarily a cause of upheaval. If this nation can take Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging in a stride and has not bothered much about the assassination of his daughter, another political family being decimated will not be out of the ordinary.

There is a point of view in the League circles that the Hudaibia Paper Mills Case can paper over the Sharif family’s differences because Shahbaz Sharif and his sons will now see the benefit of huddling and hand-holding in front of a combined threat of political extinction. That would firm the family up from within and the resources that Shahbaz Sharif’s sons are putting in gutting Uncle and Baji will be deployed to fight a critical survival war. This view carries considerable weight but the opposite can also happen.

The Hudaibia Paper Mills Case can divide the family even more as Shahbaz Sharif and his sons can see it as a direct result of Nawaz and Maryam’s stubbornness to cling to the centre-stage when the establishment wants them to disappear permanently. Nothing focuses the mind so completely on the causes of death as the sure prospect of it. Shahbaz Sharif and his sons might start to wonder if their fortunes would have been different if it were not for the Uncle-Baji combine.

Similar thoughts can also cross the minds of those who are with the party but are getting increasingly weary of the constant tug of war that has reduced their government to a shadow and a husk. Party meetings remain vibrant and there are oaths of allegiance that are spoken every now and then to the satisfaction of Nawaz Sharif. N-League representatives continue with their robust defence of the ousted prime minister. After every hearing at the NAB courts, a substantial degree of defiant material is produced by ministers and party loyalists, showing that they are not cowed down by the unfavourable flow of events. You hear them shout slogans and there is heart-warming oratory of ‘never leaving the side of Nawaz Sharif’.

Be that as it may, those who shout the loudest also run the fastest when push comes to shove. We have seen that happen so many times. Support for party leaders ebbs and flows according to the fluctuation in their fortunes. The Nawaz League has big internal problems. There are good reasons to believe that, other than a handful of core Nawaz backers, the rest of the party can become comatose if the Sharif family finds itself in the hot soup of conviction and jail-terms.

Of course, they have their own government in place and that should keep the ship steady for them. However, the Abbasi government has so far been a non-government. Its initial burst of energy has petered out and been replaced by visible dysfunctionality. Its finance minister is down and out; its defence minister is prominent in his absence and its foreign minister is famous for speeches, statements, tweets and infrequent visibility. As for the interior minister, his famous this is “not a banana republic” statement mocks him every second day. The most recent example is that of the siege of Islamabad that has rendered all claims hollow of the interior minister, or for that matter the prime minister and his cabinet that they are in charge of Pakistan. A government that cannot manage one main road of the capital, leaves millions at the mercy of a few thousand protesters and makes a joke of its writ for days on end is hardly a great resource to rely on for the Sharifs in times of urgent need.

On the problem scale of one to ten, the Sharifs are somewhere close to 9. They are facing the real prospect of being uprooted permanently from politics and of their financial empire being taken apart. They have fought a political battle legally and the strategy has brought them into a bind. From here it is a long, hard way up.

The only solace the Sharif family can draw from this grim assessment is that those they accuse of undermining them aren’t really good at manipulation and engineering. Most of the political projects of recent times have met a sorry fate or have led to laughable results. The saga in Karachi is a great illustration of this reality. The other example is the Musharraf-led meaningless alliance of 23-parties that have near-zero electoral support. The more such projects come out and fall before rising, the stronger the hope the Sharifs may entertain that they too shall pass through this storm. It is a slim hope to cling to, but the Sharifs would not mind having it at this point in time when they have little else going for them.

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

Email: syedtalathussain@gmail.com

Twitter: @TalatHussain12