Nawaz Sharif : Their perfidy

EDITORIAL:Frontier Post

Hypocrisy, doublespeak and perfidy though make up an integral, rather the most outstanding, part of our political class. But the PML (N) of Nawaz Sharif

is a class unto itself in this artifice, currently setting new records to beat its own previous milestones in this chicanery. As a Supreme Court’s bench put the prime minister on contempt notice, instantly the PML (N) clan’s grandees burst into a shrill he had lost the legitimacy and must resign. What they conveniently forgot was their own head-honcho too had in his second power stint been served a contempt notice by the apex court. But neither had he squirmed if he had lost legitimacy nor did he resign. He indeed made a big show of his court appearance to answer the contempt notice. He didn’t go to the apex court with humility as a contemnor at the court’s mercy. Instead, he travelled to the court standing all the way in an open car like those victorious generals in ancient times going riding on chariots to royal court to be decorated ceremoniously by their kings or queens. And the state broadcaster, this self-styled democratic ruler too having not allowed private enterprise in the electronic media, dutifully put the footage of his victor-style journey on home-screens for the hoi polloi’s benefit. This much should suffice to unmask the PML (N) clan’s chanting choir’s ugly perfidy.But their head-honcho himself is being no lesser perfidious nowadays. He is posing to be an angel with not a black spot on his white visage. He talks as if his hands have always been clean. Zardari, he shouts day in and day out, must come clean on the Swiss case. Yes, he must, immunity or no immunity, to satisfy a deeply perturbed nation, though no lesser to clear his name to his own personal good. But what Nawaz conveniently glosses over is the fact that he too faces a slew of malfeasance cases, some pending in courts, some seemingly under a halted probe. One relating to the infamous Mehrangate involving alleged illicit distribution of money by the ISI to various political stars featuring in its cobbled-up IJI political formation is long lying with the apex court for ruling. Nawaz figures prominently among the alleged beneficiaries. Now that he lays claim to being an uncompromising stickler of law, won’t it be in the fitness of things if he himself knocks at the court’s door and fervently appeals for this case’s disposal, no lesser to clear his name? And now that he has been calling on Zardari to bring back his stashed assets from abroad, when would he bring back his own hoards from overseas? Zardari, he demands, must come clean on how he had accumulated so much of wealth abroad. Yes, Zardari must tell the source. But shouldn’t Nawaz too tell the source of his own overseas hoards? To be credible, preacher must practice first what he preaches. Nawaz must understand one thing. Our people are no halfwits or fools. If media eminences are not asking this, the people do want to know this from both, as much from him as from Zardari. Indeed, he is badly mistaken if has taken to the belief that by some quirk of miracle the people have been taken in by his posturing of piety. He will be shocked to know that the mass of the people take him to be no paragon of nobility and virtues. In the popular estimation, he is the chip of the same block the eminences strutting on the national political stage are made up of. He may be thinking by his posturing he is beguiling the people. But veritably he is not.When he empathises with the forsaken flood-devastated of Sindh, they certainly do get impressed, so forgetfully by their own Sindh government they live in misery. But those ruined by the 2010 destructive flash flooding in Punjab sneer scornfully at his skullduggery. Two years have passed, and almost the whole lot of them is yet to see even a bleak sign of his promised model villages for them. They indeed are surviving as dismally and as despondently as their Sindh peers, totally neglected by their own Punjab government led by none else but by Nawaz’s own younger sibling. And no little jeering does he draw from the masses and the thinking class alike for blasting the Zardari &Co for acute lack of governance when Punjab itself is no model of good governance. The province is in the squeezing grip of lawlessness and criminality, with freely-operating fanatical outfits adding up their own vileness to make this grim situation grimmer. And the Punjab government has been as inept and inert as its other provincial peers in controlling the price in the market, which too is a provincial responsibility as is the maintenance of law and order. After all, it is not without reason that the new rising political star has made such deep inroads in Punjab which Nawaz had somehow construed to be his unshakable stronghold and invulnerable lair, even as he couldn’t sweep it in the 2008 poll despite wearing a political martyr’s mantle. But then Nawaz was never a political giant. He was just a dwarf, stretched far beyond his stature by the lords of garrisons and agencies. No visionary or statesman is he. Just a politico of ordinary level, catapulted artificially into a grandee by a fawning media in reality is he.