Mr Zardari has announced his intention to get his son Bilawal and himself elected to parliament from traditional PPP Sindh constituencies. Father and son aim to jointly mount opposition to PM Nawaz Sharif in alliance with like-minded parties. Is this ominous for Mr Sharif?
Imran Khan has welcomed Mr Zardari’s political initiative. But he is in no mood to relinquish his role of the real opposition leader in and out of parliament. Is this ominous for both Mr Zardari and Mr Sharif?
The big deal for Mr Zardari is a parliamentary umbrella for staying in Pakistan and playing politics in the run up to the next elections in 2018. If the military establishment was signalling its intention to target him and make him flee again, it will have to think again. Mr Zardari is staying put on the basis of two astute calculations.
One, regardless of any contrary moves signalling continuity with the military’s past policies in Sindh, the new army chief handpicked by Mr Sharif will most likely desist from linking Mr Zardari to terrorism as his predecessor did in the case of Dr Asim Hussain. Any such move would outrage the PPP, alienate it from parliamentary politics and push it into the lap of Imran Khan’s agitation politics. This would hurt Nawaz Sharif by destabilising the political system all over again. Therefore, regardless of what the Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan says or thinks, Mr Sharif has most probably indicated his mind on this subject to the new army and ISI chiefs. If it is also much too early in the game for the two of them to blithely override the prime minister’s advice, it will also not be lost on both Khakis that the policy of linking terrorism with politics has come a cropper for two main reasons: the military does not have the legal wherewithal to successfully prosecute the likes of Dr Asim and his ilk, let alone Mr Zardari; and its inability to extend the same operation into the other provinces has smacked of discrimination and victimisation, thereby discrediting it in the popular imagination.
Therefore it is no coincidence that, following Mr Zardari’s expression of interests, Mr Sharif was quick to meet with the new ISI chief and Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan. Surely, it doesn’t require rocket science to figure out what his advice was to both gentlemen: give the PPP a break! His meeting with Maulana Fazal ur Rahman shortly afterwards exhorting him to play a role in establishing a modus vivendi with Mr Zardari is clear evidence of his way forward.
The PPP has listed four demands: reconstitution of a parliamentary committee on national security, appointment of a full-fledged foreign minister, implementation of the resolution on CPEC adopted at an earlier All-Parties Conference hosted by Mr Zardari and passage of the PPP’s draft Panama Inquiry Bill approved by the Senate. Out of these, Mr Sharif should not have any serious problems conceding the first two and compromising on the third. Three out of four is good enough to convince Mr Zardari to stay clear of the fiery Imran Khan.
Until now, Imran Khan has hogged the anti-Nawaz show. The PPP’s Khurshid Shah and Aitzaz Ahsan have been playing good and bad cop respectively but not too successfully. Now Mr Zardari and Bilawal Bhutto will shoulder that responsibility and most likely do a better job. The former is a deal maker par excellence and will use the latter’s indiscreet charm to whip up media support.
While Mr Sharif and Mr Zardari jostle amiably in parliament, attention is likely to remain focused on what happens next in the Supreme Court. Imran Khan has succeeded in pressurising the new chief justice of Pakistan, Justice Saqib Nisar, to publicly state that he will dispense justice without fear or favour – an allusion to Khan’s allegations that Justice Nisar is “close” to Mr Sharif and his threat to boycott the proceedings if the SCJ decides to set up a judicial commission to probe Panamagate. The very fact that Justice Nisar felt compelled to speak his mind through such a statement rather than a judgment as behoves the judiciary speaks volumes about the relationship of law and popular politics.
The PMLN is notorious for being a bully when it is riding high and for scraping the floor when it is down. The installation of a new army chief who is not given to political meddling should give the ruling party significant space to settle down and deliver its promises to the electorate. But if it squanders this space by unnecessarily squabbling with the brass, as it did with the last army chief, then all will be lost.