Daily Times

The way news of Nawaz Sharif’s return, as yet unconfirmed, has got everybody in the ruling party running from pillar to post and falling all over themselves ought to remind those with slightly longer memories of what they used to say shortly after they were brought to power. Nawaz Sharif would soon be forgotten, they boasted because PTI’s performance would make the people of Pakistan erase the memory of all previous governments from their minds.

Yet here we are, almost four years down the road, and the mere mention of Nawaz’s return to the country has spooked PTI bigwigs in a way that even their blind followers and admirers didn’t expect. And there’s a very good reason for his fear. They know how Nawaz Sharif will be welcomed by the people of Pakistan. The people might have been fed one lie after another to delegitimise the former three-time PM in their eyes, but nobody knows like the masses that the proof of the pudding lies in the eating. And since they’ve had to, and still have to, pay very dearly for PTI’s particular flavour of pudding, which has given just about everybody a rather bad case of political indigestion, they yearn for the return of the leader that took far better care of them and also the country.

In so many ways, the PTI has only itself to blame for the crisis it is in right now. In the first place, if its performance had been something to write home about, the people might well have had reason to move on from the politics and political parties of the past. And their claim would have been proved correct; that people would have been so impressed by them that they would have had no need for anybody else; not even past memories. Yet they’ve made everything so much worse, especially the economy and people’s daily lives, that you can bet with clear certainty that no administration in more than 70 years would have performed so poorly. It’s only natural, then, for the people to want the old guard back. So much for the Naya Pakistan that was sold so shamelessly to an unsuspecting public.

Promises of millions of jobs and houses and also legislation to turn the country into a welfare state now seem like very cruel jokes.

But there’s another reason that PTI is so demonised by the mere mention of Nawaz Sharif. More than anybody else, it was the ruling party that kept the former PM alive in the minds of the people. Because whenever anything would go wrong, which has been very often, they thought it was a good idea to blame Nawaz Sharif and his government for it. At first, people were willing to give this claim some room. But when things only worsened, and all the time previous rulers were blamed for everything, even when things were better in their times, the people saw through the whole thing and sporadic results have been visible in almost all by-elections and local body polls in the last year or so.

The painful fact of the matter, especially from the ruling party’s point of view, is that the ride that PTI had taken the whole country on is now coming to a rather unceremonious and premature end. Promises of millions of jobs and houses and also legislation to turn the country into a welfare state now seem like very cruel jokes to the people of Pakistan. Also, as this artificial political structure unravels, PTI will not have to answer just to the people. The noise it made blinded forces outside politics that exert a very heavy influence on all important matters of the state as well. And now that they check their cost-benefit sheet, they see no public works, no dream houses, no welfare state, no expat-funded dams, and literally no jobs. Instead, they see a collapsing economy, highest prices and lowest employment in decades, the rupee at its weakest, and trade balance and current account very badly out of control. They’ve also seen foreign loans bloat like never before. Then there’s also the very long list of the so-called U-turns, of course, which is still growing at an alarming pace.

Still, they say with complete confidence that if anything is off track, it is because of Nawaz. But if that were really so, would there be such frantic activity in the ruling party just because there’s talk of Nawaz coming back to the country where he still faces a prison sentence? As elections near, the people tend to become more important. That’s why their reaction to Nawaz’s return will be the litmus test for his popularity. It’s not long before everything will be much clearer.

The writer is a LUMS graduate and currently serves as PMLN MPA. She is a close aide of Maryam Nawaz and tweets at @hinaparvezbutt