Sitting behind bars in
Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore, Nawaz Sharif is fighting the toughest battle of his
life against Pakistan’s security establishment of the country. But the same is
the case with the establishment, which is facing the most difficult challenges
of its 70 years of hegemony.
Sharif and his
daughter Maryam have refused every single offer of the establishment to mend
fences and strike a deal. The security establishment is also facing pressure
from within the country after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s move to
annex Kashmir. Retired Brigadier Ijaz Shah, a crony of General Pervez Musharraf, was
brought in as interior minister to dismantle the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz
(PML-N), but despite a brutal crackdown against the party, he has not been able
to bring it down.
Meanwhile, a report prepared for the US Senate by the
bipartisan Congressional Research Service has indicated that the Pakistani
security establishment covertly manipulated politics before and during the
general elections of 2018 with the motive of removing Nawaz Sharif and his
PML-N from power. Sharif might not be in the good books of President Donald
Trump’s administration for his tilt toward China and Turkey, but certainly this
report will change the minds of many senators in the US.
This is another blow
to the image of the Pakistani establishment, which is still trying to end the
country’s global isolation on the diplomatic front. Perhaps this is the reason
that according to reliable sources Nawaz Sharif has been reached out to again by
the establishment, and this time his younger brother and PML-N president
Shahbaz Sharif was also urged to abandon the anti-establishment stance and go
into exile in London for a couple of months.
The PML-N itself is
divided over this issue, as many of its stalwarts including Shahbaz believe
that Nawaz Sharif should accept a deal and go to London along with his daughter
Maryam Nawaz and, in return after a few months, the establishment will
compensate him in the form of suspending his prison sentence and ending the
current Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government. However, Sharif neither
trusts the establishment nor is willing to leave the country.
If the whistleblowers
are correct, Sharif has conveyed to the establishment that he will not leave
the country and wants certain members of the establishment and the judiciary to
confess publicly that they ousted him from power deliberately and rigged
the ballot to keep him out of office. PML-N financial supremo and ex-finance
minister Ishaq Dar, while talking to this correspondent from London on this
issue, said: “Nawaz Sharif will not enter into any understanding which forces
him or Maryam to leave Pakistan or politics.”
Dar also maintains
that the establishment is not trustworthy, as in past it apologized to him
after two brigadiers who were sitting in a joint investigating committee
against him had falsely reported that he failed to file tax returns for 20
years but after that apology, instead of giving Dar a clean chit, the
establishment forced him into exile.
Dar’s remarks clearly
reflect the lack of trust between Sharif and the establishment.
So right now after not
been able to persuade Sharif to make a deal, the establishment is left with
very limited options. It can oust Prime Minister Imran Khan through an in-house
change and make a “forward block” whereby the PML-N under Shahbaz Sharif with
the help of the Pakistan Peoples Party can form a government in the center and
in Punjab. However, the problem remains that Shahbaz and the other old
stalwarts of the PML-N cannot attract the needed vote bank, and without the
masses’ support a Shahbaz-led government would meet the same fate that Imran
Khan’s is meeting in the form of a lack of political credibility both at home
and abroad.
Another option for
establishment is to cling to the current political discourse as long as it can
and hope that Washington and Riyadh will keep injecting dollars and riyals to
save Pakistan’s sinking economy. This option, however, is not a long-term
solution, as with the begging bowl Pakistan’s economy may survive but it will
never grow.
The last option for
the establishment is a full retreat from its current stance, letting the PTI
sink and holding a new general election, and after that returning to the
barracks.
Nowadays the security
establishment is under huge pressure to respond to Modi’s annexation of Jammu
and Kashmir by waging a war against India, but on the other hand it is being
criticized heavily in every nook and corner of Pakistan for being responsible
for engineering the political discourse and bringing Imran Khan to power with a
fractured mandate. So a tactical retreat could avert the pressure to wage war,
something that in any case is impossible with the bleeding economy, and it
would also lessen the criticism from the masses for its involvement in
politics. This could mean that Imran Khan will be made the fall guy for not
being able to garner international support on the Kashmir issue and for the
economic turmoil in Pakistan.
However, for this to
happen, Nawaz Sharif will need to make sure that the pro-establishment and
old-school stalwarts of his party do not abandon him as they did when he
returned to Pakistan with Maryam to allow himself to be arrested in July last
year. On that day had Shahbaz Sharif and his son Hamza along with other party
stalwarts shown some courage and led the mammoth gathering
of PML-N supporters to the airport, the history of Pakistani politics could
have changed entirely.
The PML-N missed that
chance because genetically it was not a political party that was known for
taking on the establishment. However, first Sharif and then his daughter Maryam
Nawaz changed the narrative of the party entirely, and that is the reason that
the establishment is trying everything to stop the pair from walking further on
the anti-establishment path. The problem remains that the longer Sharif and
Maryam sit in jail the more popular they will become, and with each passing day
the economic turmoil and diplomatic isolation of Pakistan are getting worse.
It is almost game over
for those characters who rigged the political discourse, and within a few
months, Imran Khan or someone from the establishment will be made the fall guy
for the political turmoil, foreign-policy failures and the economic meltdown of
the country. The security establishment eventually will negotiate with Sharif
and other democratic leaders for a face-saving exit from this failed undeclared
coup.
Probably Khan and a few
people from the security establishment will come hard at Sharif in a bid to
regain the lost battle, but it is too late. If Sharif did not surrender in the
toughest of times, he will never do it now when the writing is clearly on the
wall that it is all over for Imran Khan and his backers in the establishment.
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