Nawaz’s turnabout

The Frontier Post

Not even a nincompoop is wee bit surprised at this turnabout of Mian Nawaz Sharif, the PML (N) supremo. Shocked is only that bevy of palmed off media stars and fondling intellectual lights that had been projecting him disingenuously as a giant which he really is not. The street knows him for what he actually is: a pigmy and an imposter, given congenitally to opportunism and expediency, professing deceitfully commitment to principled politics with which he has no truck at all and which palpably is none of his forte. It is only the fawning crowd that had spuriously been painting him as a staunch lover of independent judiciary, but to the great amusement of the street which fretted sceptically how could he be, this erstwhile invader of the Supreme Court and the conqueror of the superior judiciary. Not the least bemused was the street by these equally deceitful cheerleaders’ chant that he was an unvarnished democrat committed to democracy and constitutionalism. It was too much of a joke that it could take. Not even the Atlantic’s entire waters can wash from the street’s searing memory that had he the required numbers in the Senate, this charlatan would have been sitting on this ill-starred nation’s neck today as its Ameerul Momineen for lifetime, a law unto himself and his word the law of the land, with the whole of the democracy and constitution shop rolled up and thrown into the junkyard for good. How could this cloned baby of the garrison hatcheries and the longtime loyal companion and toady of praetorian generals and dictators be taken as true in his tall assertions of civilian supremacy and subservience of the military to the civilian rule? That unsettling question has never left the street’s troubled mind. And not even a saintly sage could convince a starkly sceptical street that this compulsive neglector and irreverent of parliament in his glory times was now a devotee and fan of parliament’s supremacy. During his two prime ministerial stints, not just to the nation’s highest elected body he gave a short shrift in the making of state policies and decisions, he even kept his cabinets of ministers out of it. It was a select coterie of his kitchen cabinet that he would consult at best to run the country as autocratically as he runs his party despotically even today. Can anyone with a modicum of sense imagine for a moment that his party team on the parliamentary constitutional reforms committee was working on its own without any knowledge of him or any instructions from him? You must be kidding. How many times have you heard in these very recent times his party people saying on crucial issues that Mian Sahib would decide the party position or stance? And how many times have you heard them saying his word would be the last? So what is it that has prompted Mian Sahib to make this turnabout at the eleventh hour to put the almost entire finished work of the parliamentary committee in state of uncertainty and doldrums? What expediency is it that has motivated this grandee to this rash and reckless hatchet work? There must be a method to his madness, a shrewd operator as he is who like a seasoned businessman calculates carefully his costs and profits before embarking on a venture. He must have done this cost-benefit thing, carefully weighing what political gains are going to accrue to him, even though for the present it looks his seemingly idiotic move is likely to hurt him politically in the public eye. But for this, soothly, he is least bothered. With his enormous wealth, much of it slush, and with moneyed people and powerful feudal aristocrats holding pocket boroughs inhabited by enslaved electorates on his back he feels secure enough to romp home even amidst a miffed public. Still, if with his adventurous stroke his fawning cheerleaders in the media, in the intellectual nobility and in the civil society glitterati stand completely flummoxed, the street lies squarely prostrate. The street had hoped once the political elites are through with their constitutional game, they would find some time to think of the people’s multiplying miseries and travails. And they are indeed pathetically placed. They are being mowed down day in and day out by mounting problems of poverty and squalor, disease and aliments, joblessness and wants, price hikes and power and gas shortages, and official corruption and malfeasance. On top of it, criminality, lawlessness and terrorism have driven them to an utter sense of insecurity and sleepless nights. With his recklessness, Mian Sahib has dashed their hopes to the ground to become dust. What a love and affection for an unfortunate people!