Poisoned Chalice

by Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

Nawaz Sharif is reportedly at death’s door. He has been treated in a most inhumane and callous manner while in custody. This is a thrice-elected prime minister who voluntarily returned from London and went to prison. This is a man who was kept in jail while his wife was dying in London. This is a man who has been convicted by the Supreme Court on the thread of a loose definition of “assets” in an unauthorized reference dictionary in the prejudicial context of “Sicilian Mafia”. This is a man who has been convicted by a judge who was blackmailed to get his conviction. This is a man who has resolutely resisted the various offerings of the Establishment to leave Pakistan and quit politics. His crime: he ran afoul of the Establishment by mistaking the elected office of prime minister for the font of power in Pakistan. Worse, he refused to learn and repent.

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Popular opinion holds that Imran Khan is personally responsible for Nawaz Sharif’s deteriorating health. His government has tightened the screws by withdrawing all manner of decent prison and medical facilities befitting an ex-prime minister. Yet when a reporter recently confronted Mr Khan with this perception, “he threw his arms up with a bewildered look on his face: ‘Am I the doctor? Am I the court’?” The reporter added that shortly thereafter Mr Khan called up the Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar and ordered him to arrange a meeting between Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Mariam. A day earlier, Mariam’s request for such a meeting had been denied by a NAB accountability court. Clearly, Mr Khan has answered his own questions.

Mr Khan also told reporters that there was a “foreign hand” behind Maulana Fazal ur Rahman’s long march and dharna. Incredibly enough, he pointed a finger at India! If he had hinted at another foreign power with which the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam and its leader has had traditional religious relations, he might have been less incredible. But how could he have summoned up the courage to bite the hand that feeds him?

The Maulana is still talking tough. But suspicions have arisen about his aims and objectives. It has been reported that he met Establishment Big Wigs recently and was told flatly that there would be no minus-Imran solution and that there might be other “minuses” amongst politicians. Curiously, opposition party activists are being arrested daily even as Mr Khan has belatedly allowed the dharma to proceed to Islamabad. The Establishment has reportedly told the Maulana that his dharna should be short and peaceful, otherwise it would do its “constitutional duty” to protect the “lawful” government. This is in sharp contrast to what it did during Mr Khan’s long drawn out dharna.
The fate of Nawaz Sharif hangs in the balance. Some “connected” journalists are claiming that both father and daughter will be allowed to go to London without an NRO because Nawaz is precariously ill and the Establishment doesn’t want his blood on their hands – they are still reaping the political backlash from the assassinations of two Bhuttos. The popular mood in the Punjab – the recruiting ground and bulwark of the Establishment – has palpably turned against it. This is unprecedented.

We – people and institutions – are all drinking from a poisoned chalice. Imran Khan is guzzling from the poisoned chalice of a rigged election. The people are choking on the poisoned chalice of the IMF. The opposition parties and leaders are swallowing from the poisoned chalice of their corruptions and commissions. The Establishment is gulping from the poisoned chalice of its regional adventures and internal interventions. The judiciary is swigging from the poisoned chalice of its great betrayal of the lawyers’ movement.

This need not have been the case. Only six years ago, we witnessed a peaceful transfer of power, the second consecutive handing over of the baton from one elected government to the next. The judiciary gave hope with its newly grown spine courtesy the successful lawyers’ movement. The media, though raucous, was reverberating with the din of democracy. Nawaz Sharif’s government was making regional alliances and reaching out to neighbours. The 18th Amendment had devolved power to the provinces, fulfilling a long-standing demand of Pakistan’s alienated ethnic populations. This was in the natural order of things: the system growing, changing, adapting, on the road to cleansing itself.

But these very changes threatened to whittle down the power of Pakistan’s deep state. The latter’s response was concerted and fierce. We all know what happened thereafter but it is deeply ironical that we are once again desperate for the reprieves that were all within grasp only a few years ago – peace at home and goodwill abroad, relief from international punitive actions, a buoyant economy, a developing democracy worthy of respect. We cannot upturn the natural order of things and expect to come up trumps again and again. Our chalices will remain poisoned until we purge ourselves.

An ill-wind is blowing over Pakistan

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his allies are making decidedly ominous statements. While announcing a relief package for the agricultural sector, Mr Sharif suddenly veered off his subject at the Convention Centre in Islamabad and started talking of “those who would like to overthrow the government and rule directly themselves”, followed by a couple of similar sentences meaning similar things.

If this statement wasn’t oblique enough, he then spoke of how neither he nor his family was using state resources to line their pockets. Indeed, he added, “all our personal expenditures come from our own personal resources and there cannot even be a whiff of corruption attached to us”. The linking of “corruption” with an intervention against the government has clinched the suspicion that Mr Sharif believes that sections of the military establishment are still out to “get him” and his government. This time, it is suspected, by initiating action against allegedly corrupt elements in the PMLN federal and Punjab provincial governments as they have done in Sindh against the PPP government by effectively taking over the reins of power in the NAB and FIA.

Mr Sharif’s ANP ally, Asfandyar Wali Khan, was more forthright. When asked if he foresaw a military intervention by year’s end – because of carefully planted stories of GHQ’s anger at the continuing corrupt practices of ruling politicians – he warned that “if, God forbid, such an intervention were to occur, it would lead to the break up of Pakistan”. Stronger words on the subject have not been uttered nor such a bleak scenario publicly articulated.

For an explanation, we need only to look at the recent behaviour of the one political leader who is desperately seeking a short cut to power on the back of the military: Imran Khan. His dharna last year was based on the theory of the third umpire putting an end to Nawaz Sharif’s innings and paving the way for Imran Khan’s entry into Islamabad. This is now an established fact. Several credible reports of the involvement of the then ISI chief, Lt Gen Zaheer ul Islam, in this conspiracy are circulating in the media. But Imran Khan’s failure hasn’t deterred him.

Now Khan is threatening to forcibly eject the four provincial election commissioners from office – they hold constitutional positions and cannot be ousted under any circumstances short of resigning themselves — by staging a mass rally in front of the ECP’s office in Islamabad despite a ban on such rallies in the capital. He is also defying the code of conduct of the ECP forbidding government and opposition leaders from canvassing on behalf of their candidates in local elections in the Punjab. He successfully challenged the ECP decision in the Lahore High Court. But the ECP has obtained a stay from the Supreme Court and ordered the Chief Secretaries and IGPs of all the provinces to ensure strict implementation of the ECP’s code of conduct. The PMLN has said it will abide by the law. But Imran Khan has said he won’t because he considers the law illegal. So the stage is being set for violent clashes between the PTI and the Punjab and Islamabad administrations of the PMLN.

If Imran Khan can create violent disturbances in Punjab or Islamabad during the local elections in October-November, we may expect to witness a repeat dharna-type performance that attempts to draw the military into the fray. The PTI has plastered over 20,000 banners in Lahore’s NA 122 with candidate Aleem Khan’s picture alongside that of the army chief General Raheel Sharif. And Imran Khan has publicly called upon the Rangers and the military establishment to carry out accountability of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats in Punjab, a demand that is clearly unconstitutional.

Finally, a rather sinister development is already making waves in the media. This is the question of whether or not Gen Raheel Sharif deserves an extension in service before he retires at the end of next year – “for doing such a great job as the saviour of Pakistan against the scourge of terrorism and corruption” – unlike his predecessor General Kayani. It may be recalled that in the latter months of his first tenure, Gen Kayani destabilized the PPP government on at least two occasions even as a debate about his extension was raging the media.

General Raheel Sharif is a soldier’s soldier. It is inconceivable that he and his lieutenants are involved in destabilizing the PMLN government or that he is maneuvering to seek an extension in tenure. But there is no doubt that an ill will is blowing in the direction of Islamabad and none other than Imran Khan is huffing and puffing again to bring the house down.

PM Nawaz Sharif is rightly sensitive to Intel data that has led him to allude to another dharna-type conspiracy in the offing. We should know how the game is unfolding by observing Imran Khan’s course of action.