Daily Times

Following his ouster from the Prime Minister’s office Nawaz Sharif is seemingly defying the heaviest of odds of his life trying to keep his Party intact. He knows that with a disintegrating party he would quickly lose his grip over the federal and Punjab governments. This would mean not only forgetting for good the anticipated more than two-third majority in the forthcoming Senate elections scheduled in March next year but also of course losing the chances of the PMLN forming a government at the center for the fourth time after 2018 general elections.

That is why the defiant GT road rally soon after losing the PM’s office and the continued defiant posturing during the NA 120 polls that was contested by Kulsoom Nawaz, his ailing wife in absentia and led by his daughter Maryam Nawaz as if she was leading the campaign of an opposition party candidate. Sharif’s speech at Wednesday’s ‘Press Conference’ (which it was not) also sounded more like the grumbles of a political martyr.

But unlike on the past two occasions when the ‘non-democratic’ elements were universally seen to have had an unconcealed hand in ousting him it is the law of the land that is being seen to have caused his ouster this time making it almost impossible even for his ardent supporters to agree with his self-image of being a martyr.

And even those who are not supporters of Nawaz and question his democratic credentials but have persuaded themselves to believe that he is being hounded out by our permanent establishment find it difficult to come out openly in support of Nawaz because of their reluctance to the ignore the corruption charges that Nawaz has consistently failed to answer with clarity and also because of the seeming absence of any blatant evidence of establishment’s involvement so far in the judicial process.

A large section of the media is still supporting Sharif’s defiant posturing. This indicates that the once all-powerful establishment has finally lost its clout in the media to an extent

Of course those who subscribe to the dictum that “Justice rushed is justice crushed” have viewed with a lot of misgivings the Supreme Court’s directives to the JIT to complete its job within 60days and subsequent directive of a time-limit of six months to the accountability courts with a Supreme Court Judge monitoring the process on the orders of the bench that had heard the Panama papers case.

These elements also view with similar misgivings the surprisingly mysterious appearance of the followers of Mumtaz Qadri, the hanged murderer of Governor Salmaan Taseer and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) supported candidates in the NA 120 elections who amassed the third and fourth largest number of votes in the contest leaving far behind even the PPP and Jamaat-i-Islami candidates.

Some suspect that ‘interested quarters’ linked to the establishment had ‘something’ to do with these most unlikely candidates successfully dodging all the legal electoral barriers that make it impossible for such persons to contest elections in Pakistan.

The purpose of fielding these unlikely candidates in the NA 120 by-elections seems to have been, according to the detractors of the establishment, not to let the PTI candidate win the seat but to reduce the winning margin small enough to quicken the pace of Party’s disintegration which it was perhaps believed by the permanent establishment in view of what had happened after the October 1998 ouster, would have started soon after the July 28, 2017 Supreme Court verdict.

Sharif’s efforts to normalize relations with India, if one went by ‘knowledgeable’ quarters in the media, which though not reciprocated by New Delhi with equal enthusiasm was said to have annoyed no end the permanent establishment, therefore, the attempt to remove Nawaz through a judicial process using a God sent opportunity that had accidentally come to light following the publication of Panama Papers.

To some the very fact that an indirect way was chosen by the permanent establishment to get rid of an ‘unwanted’ political government indicated that the forces-that-be no more enjoyed the political omnipotence that they used to in the immediate past in the national scheme of things because according to Islamabad’s Washington watchers the establishment’s permanent backer, the Pentagon seemed to have for its own selfish reasons abandoned its Rawalpindi friends accusing them of harboring those that kill the US soldiers in Afghanistan. Therefore, the ‘half-way house’ SC verdict against Nawaz on the basis of ‘Iqama’ rather than on the basis of charges emanating from the ‘evidence’ revealed by the Panama Papers.

Also, the fact that a large section of the media is still supporting the defiant posturing of Nawaz Sharif indicated further that the once all powerful establishment has finally lost to an extent its clout with the media. But that it still enjoyed significant support in the media is borne out by the fact that a considerably powerful section of the media has been working overtime to paint Nawaz in the worst of colours possible and to persuade its viewers to believe that once the Nawaz rule is replaced with a so-called ‘technocratic’ government of ‘honest ’and ‘efficient’ people the ‘dark night’ of misrule will disappear overnight along with all of ‘Nawaz created’ foreign, economic and social problems.

So far, it looks like a draw as Nawaz seems to have successfully kept his Party intact with even the mutinous former interior minister Chahudhry Nisar Ali Khan seemingly coming back into the fold and Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif having so far survived in his job even after admitting to the Asia Society in New York on Wednesday that the Haqqanis and Hafiz Saeed of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) were a liability for his country, ‘I accept that they are liabilities, but give us time to get rid of them because we don’t have the assets to match these liabilities and you are increasing (liabilities) them.’

But as they say the match is not over until it is finally over, Nawaz and his Party is likely to remain in the dock until the accountability courts complete their job by March. However, there is a long list of eminent lawyers who don’t believe these cases would come to conclusion any time soon and expect them to continue even after the 2018 elections.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Islamabad. He served as the Executive Editor of Express Tribune until 2014

Published in Daily Times, September 30^th 2017.