Daily Times

For Nawaz Sharif, the show must go on.

And this latest Act has seen Nawaz return to form, playing to the cheap seats. The deposed Prime Minister is, he assures his supporters, a man who respects the peoples’ verdict. That he has said so means it must be true.

Except that the will of the people never trumps those who have a grip on power. Or else why didn’t Nawaz just #Go during those heady days of the sit-ins of yesteryear? The answer to that is pretty much the one that explains why the odious Tony Blair chose not to give two hoots to the two million-odd protesters — as well as his own backbenchers — who said the Iraq war would never be in their name. And it is why, today, Theresa May looks set to do her best to cling on to the bitter end. In other words, the people are to be used as accessories to prop up faltering regimes or to be discarded as superfluous to requirements as soon as the going gets good.

Here in Pakistan, it is easy to cry wolf about hidden hands and those with a nefarious agenda. This is not to deny the reality of this. But it is to ask; for how much longer are the country’s political parties willing to trade on this? When will they wake up to the fact that they can’t forever and exclusively measure their democratic record by the extent to which they can hold the security establishment at bay.

Had he wanted to take on the ‘judicial dictatorship’ — Nawaz would have moved treason charges against Musharraf for the original 1999 sin. After all, the Eighteenth Amendment repealed the good general’s controversial Legal Framework Order. Thereby rendering the Supreme Court judges’ indemnity null and void. But then the juice has to be worth the squeeze

That the previous PPP government completed its tenure, making it the first in Pakistan’s history to do so, may have been a triumph of vengeful democracy. Or it may have been down to a deal with the very devil to which the party has always made a big show of resisting. After all, it was on the PPP watch that Osama Bin Laden was killed; on its watch that the Mumbai attacks happened, with Gen Kayani at the helm as COAS; on its watch that the latter’s tenure as Army chief was extended; on its watch that Gen (rtd) Musharraf was afforded safe and honourable exit from the country.

That Nawaz hasn’t found favour with the security establishment doesn’t make him more of a democrat. The same may be said of his moves to have Musharraf tried for treason over the 2007 State of Emergency. These, after all, stopped short of charging him with the same for the original sin of abrogating the Constitution following the infamous 1999 coup. Which, Nawaz could in theory have proceeded towards had he really wanted to challenge the so-called ‘judicial dictatorship’. Especially given how the Eighteenth Amendment repealed the good general’s controversial Legal Framework Order. This, in turn, according to some experts, rendered the Supreme Court judges’ indemnity of the one-time enemy combatant’s unconstitutional machinations null and void. But then the juice has to be worth the squeeze. Meaning that if Nawaz were to go hurtling at full speed along a decidedly more treacherous collision course with the judiciary, which may or may not have its strings pulled by a certain puppet master, it had better be in his self-interests. Why else did he waste no time in fingering the SC ruling on his being unfit to hold party office by going to straight to Parliament to have himself elected party president?

Thus Nawaz’s brilliant disguise that finds him selling himself as a man of the people has already come more than a little loose at the seams. After all, he presided over a government that did its utmost to curb freedom of speech. A government whose Interior minister called on the citizenry to tell tales of blasphemous rumours. A government that monitored social media accounts to ensure no tweets, shares or likes risked tarnishing the image of our hurly burly men in khaki. A government that is said to have links to certain groups, one of which is currently being mainstreamed into the parliamentary party system. A government that had a Chief Minister urge the Punjabi Taliban to spare his province. A government that, like others before it, had done nothing to repeal the blasphemy laws or bring to an end the state-sponsored persecution of Ahmadis.

And by going off to London just days before an accountability court is due to indict him for corruption — Nawaz is sending a dangerous message to the people of this country. It is one that says an individual may disregard state institutions if he or she determines it to be in their best interests. Taken to the extreme, whether he realises it or not, this is a call to anarchy; a dismantlement of the state apparatus. And not of the symbolic tokenism urged by Imran Khan when he called on the people to stop paying utility bills and the like. This is because Nawaz is only interested in preserving his legacy. And for him, this is intrinsically linked to CPEC. He wants to go down in history as the man who can tie Pakistan to an investment deal whereby it has to repay double the down payment. But he need not worry. History has already remembered him as such.

The writer is the Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Times. She can be reached at mirandahusain@me.com and tweets @humeiwei

Published in Daily Times, October 6^th 2017.