Let us accept. On this day in the last week of the year gone by, our politics descended to the depths of infamy and shame. If we have ever attempted discerning why this hapless nation cannot get its direction right and what real malady afflicted its political class, the PML-N and MQM public spat said it all. It was crass street-urchinism and debased the popular perception of national political leadership. Their respective leaderships should have an issue to resolve in the New Year. And who set the cat among the pigeons? None other than the redoubtable Zulfiqar Mirza, the Sindh home minister. He, the caretaker of Zardari’s ultimate resort, a strategic but an equally debased Sindh card. Ever wonder how a political party — with roots in all provinces and a popular claim to being a chain that ties the federation together — may shrink its base of representation by frequently urging Sindhi nationalism to rescue it against imagined and cleverly coined other regional threats even if those be mere competitive politicking? The threshold level of the PPP’s paranoia is extremely low and it does not take them long to get agitated. There seems some serious inadequacy in the party’s psychological make-up. Quite clearly, they do not believe in what their sloganeering conveys. Zulfiqar Mirza took on the MQM and one might say not in a crassly impolite way. But then the ‘owners’ of Karachi cannot brook even a suspicious eye what to mention a compelling political entity that not only rules the province housing Karachi, but is also unwilling to cede control of the city through a probably deliberate delay in local bodies polls, which will certainly return control of the city back to the MQM. The MQM’s politics has always been urban, as it seeks relevance and validity through controlling Sindh’s three largest cities. Denying them this assurance is pushing them to the verge of uncertainty. Last week was one such expression. Add in the ANP factor that is buoyant on the back of an understanding wink and nod of the PPP’s rather permissive approach to their expansionist design in Karachi — remember Karachi is the biggest Pashtun city of Pakistan — and the MQM’s ire will be better understood. After all, the MQM has been making an unending noise of Karachi’s Talibanisation, implicitly echoing fears of a growing campaign to curtail if not neutralise the MQM’s political influence in Karachi. It is an interesting mix. The MQM wrested control of Karachi from the erstwhile religious denomination of the largely middle-class Jamaat-e-Islami, that is now only a shadow of its past self in Karachi, but the same control is now under serious threat by another strain of the religious denomination built around the Pashtun-Salafi nexus. Those who might gain politically from such facilitation will be the secular-minded ANP with some advantage to the predominantly politico-religious parties. In all this, the PPP stands to benefit indirectly on a strategic scale. If the MQM can be balanced sufficiently in Karachi, or at least embroiled in a debilitating power struggle at its base, it is likely to cede space to the PPP in the rest of Sindh, especially the larger cities of Hyderabad and Sukkur. A factor in the MQM’s recent public gathering at Bhit Shah — stronghold of the PPP in Sindh — and the ongoing tussle for turf weaves itself into a self-describing mosaic. Consider the MQM’s concurrent forays into Punjab and you have a party that has a clear design of spreading beyond its urban base in Sindh and truly taking on a national colour. Would that somewhat explain the PML-N’s public spat with the MQM? The fissures are deep and politics runs in layers. Should the MQM be derided for its ambitious agenda to venture out beyond the cities of Sindh? It is all a matter of eking out space where little space exists; that, after all, is the essence of politics. So, no harm if the MQM indeed wishes to exploit what it might sense as space at the level of the low middle-class vote. Pakistan’s politics typically resides in a feudal-serf relationship in most rural parts of the country and is pretty predictable in its voting pattern when the feudal lords contest elections. What has come to be popularly called the GT Road politics centres around the trading class. Industrial towns that populate both sides of this road between Lahore and Attock have ventured away from the landed feudal into the industrial baron’s lap. The level of servility and tribal bondage continues to, however, make this relation also predictable. This is the PML-N’s fief, and any foray therein is akin to violating its precincts. The MQM has ventured into this exclusive reserve of the PML-N looking to poach middle-class votes with claims to an egalitarian political philosophy and has encountered serious roadblocks both in Sindh and Punjab from those that have retained these as their exclusive preserves. In all this, is there a race on between Imran Khan’s PTI and the MQM too to garner political space in the face of dismal performance of both the PPP at the Centre and the PML-N in Punjab? Quite possible, and why not? As a general rule, politics the world over is seeing the resurgence of the third option between the usual two that have grown to dominate the political landscape. In Pakistan, the MQM and the PTI are both vying to become that third option. Where do we place the JUI-F in all this and their atypical jettisoning of linkages with a party in power? A broader sense of the political timing might explain this though the instinctive recourse is to find deeper meanings behind such unexpected moves and seek a link to a cloaked puppeteer. The maulana heading the JUI-F who also led the erstwhile Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) can sense elections. His bargaining power, indeed that of any potential coalition maker, is dependent on what he carries in the electoral bag. The maulana seeks to carry a larger bag through the restitution of the MMA to bolster his space for the next round of negotiations. That sadly has not happened — Syed Munawar Hassan of the Jamaat-e-Islami will not play ball; expect the maulana to not waste the remaining two years of the incumbent government if the price is right for rejoining the ruckus. The PML has reduced itself to an enigma ‘N’ from a self-assured party that does not bode well for both the party and national politics. It may like to give a sense of what it may be up to, its expression though or the lack of it tells of a deeper malaise. Is that so? We can take that up next week. The writer is a retired air vice marshal and a former ambassador