Nawaz's hypocrisy

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

Who can quibble with Mian Nawaz Sharif's pronouncement that for democracy strong political parties are a must? But strength and vibrancy come to political parties from their representative character and internal democracy. Can he in all honesty say this of even his own party? Aren't political parties that we have the fiefdoms of dynasties or personalities? Apart from admirable exception of Jamaat-e-Islami, isn't nomination not election their rule? Even the rising political star is as yet to establish if it is going to be any different with his political formation. So with what face could MNS speak of strong political parties when he is keeping his own under his thumb so autocratically? Can indeed he cite even one example from any world democracy where a non-elected politician could become the leader of his legislative party? Yet, after the 2008 election, he anointed himself the leader of the PML (N) parliamentary party, even though he was not even an elected member of the National Assembly, and appointed his younger sibling Shahbaz Sharif leader of the party in the Punjab Assembly, though he too was not yet elected to that legislative house. This much for his belief in strong political parties for the sustenance of a democratic order. But, then, we are no democracy in reality. It is just charlatans of his ilk who are branding democracy what actually is plutocracy pure and simple. A rule of the people for the people and by the people we definitely are not. A rule of the elite for the elite and by the elite we verifiably are. It is a clutch of elites that holds the nation's entire politics in its hands as its captive. They dominate the political parties, over which they rule and reign as little emperors. To hoi polloi, these are closed preserves. They can enter them, at best, as errand boys and foot soldiers, to beef up their political monarchs' public rallies and have their heads smashed by police lathi charge in protest processions and demonstrations their moguls stir up. The ladder to go up in the party hierarchy is just out of bounds to them. It is only in a real democracy that a grocer's daughter, an ordinary school teacher and a small-town lawyer can rise to pinnacles in the party as well as in the state. Not here. It is only some scion, sibling or lackey of the party supremo who alone can perform that feat in our plutocracy. And MNS is further advised to his own good not to dwell too much on his past. Our people may be an enslaved citizenry for the most part. But no nincompoops they are. They know what is what. He cannot mislead them into believing that his past was glorious when they know from one to all that it was all fraught, stinking unbearably foul. His was no institution-building era. It was a period of institution-demolition. He brawled with the nation's top judge, toyed with the terrible idea of throwing him behind the bars even if for an overnight, instigated revolt against him and saw him being ousted from his office. More horribly, in a case quite fit to go down in the Guinness Book of World Records, he scored a first-ever hit with his party goons physically attacking the Supreme Court, the nation's highest seat of justice, and driving the panicked honourable judges to run for their lives. That sigma he cannot wash off even with the oceanic waters of the Atlantic, what to talk of his self-touted pivotal role in the dysfunctional judges' restoration, particularly when his talk is all sham. All the credit of that restoration indisputably goes to the dysfunctional judges' own steadfastness of as well as the courageous protest campaign of the lawyers. Indeed, when the judges and the black coats were braving the wrath of the military dictator and the lawyers were having their heads broken by his ferocious lathi-wielding cops, MNS was nowhere on the scene. He was then cooling his heels in the cool climes of London, mounting such spurious political shows as the All Parties Democratic Movement, which of course he ditched later on by participating in the 2008 under the dictator's rule, contrary to his staged jamboree's vow. Little wonder, none in the legal fraternity seems endorsing his self-professed pivotal role in dysfunctional judges' reinstatement. Indeed, his second stint "of heavy mandate" in power was a saga of a parliament having been turned into mere rubber-stamp and a cabinet into a sheer formality. It was a select kitchen cabinet of ministers and bureaucrats, on whose shoulders he rode to rule autocratically. And had he had his way, he would have transformed this country into a theocracy, with himself perched on it as its lifelong Amirul Momineen, a law unto himself. There in fact is so much foul about his past that one is dissuaded away from buying even his mantra of being a reinvented democrat and a lover of judiciary and the rule of law.