Mian Nawaz Sharif has predicted doom for Benazir Bhutto at a number of crucial political junctures in the past, only to find that she is not as crushable today as she was in 1989. He lost the tally in the National Assembly after boasting he would make the government; he lost the battle for Punjab after claiming he would trounce Manzoor Wattoo and his new-found friends; he lost the race for the presidency after telling the press that he would make the next president.
What most of us have not noticed is that Mr Sharif is being eroded gradually and Ms Bhutto is gaining. For certain reasons we can’t see her winning and are unaware of the process of meltdown in the PML(N).
Ms Bhutto looks beleaguered. She looks as though she is being tossed on rough waves without a rudder and without many deck hands around her to create the impression that good ship PPP is capable of cleaving the brine and emerging on calm waters with hooters announcing victory. Mr Sharif sees the March election to 41 seats in the Senate as an ominous highwater mark in his toppling campaign, and thinks appearances denote unending trouble for Ms Bhutto. Instead of the PML(N) finding its realistic level of political power in March after it loses half of the 40 seats in the Senate, it is the PPP which is supposed to meet a mysterious comeuppance at the hands of equally mysterious elements if Mr Sharif can’t do his toppling through the normal channel.
Can one say that Ms Bhutto has helped create this impression because her media handling has been inept? She got hurt in the matter of loans to the Ittefaq Group and was winged by someone’s effort to link the ship that brought scrap for Mr Sharif to Mossad. To date, the charges brought by her government in the matter of the motorway have not been effectively argued, while the courts are unwittingly making the yellow cab insanity look good.
Then the Senate most uncharacteristically blackballed her bill clipping some of the autonomy that Moeen Qureshi had given the State Bank. This sudden change of heart in the PML(N)-dominated upper house must have sent economists, who had known Nawaz Sharif’s handling of the State Bank, into convulsions. This was topped by the NWFP government coming apart in the face of Mr Sharif. PPP opposition leader Aftab Sherpao’s effort to facilitate the process of disintegration of this strange power conglomeration hasn’t looked good in the press where commentators are telling Ms Bhutto ‘not to do it’.
It is a reflection on her handling of the press that journalists continue to ignore the hara-kiri that chief minister Sabir Shah stamped on his cabinet. This he did by appointing all the independents and all the PML(N) MPAs ministers, giving the fruitiest subjects to the independents who never took the gesture with any kind of gratitude.
Let us be frank. There is no juice left in the plum of the state economy. Mr Sharif was pursuing disastrous policies to give himself a leg-up with the populace. His employment scheme, his motorway, his yellow cabs and his Bait-ul-Mal hand outs related to the economy only as short-term builders of the national deficit. They rendered the country uncreditworthy and ripe for the plucking by the IMF. Ms Bhutto has the same playing field, only she can’t dip into the till and spend the way Mr Sharif did to acquire votes.
She is therefore doing the other thing to get where she thinks Mian Nawaz Sharif got by spending. Her campaign on Kashmir is a part of that process of substitution. Swept by passions, most of us are giving her credit for competently advocating the Kashmir cause. Let us hope these laurels don’t wither as soon as Washington’s interest in the subject wanes. We might then only be left with Ms Bhutto’s rhetorical promise that Kashmir would soon be a part of Pakistan.
What will Mr Sharif do if Pakistan’s difficulties multiply but not enough to unseat her? What has happened over the past three months must give him the creepy feeling that the ink-patch of the PPP’s control is slowly spreading around him, threatening to pass under his feet to the unsteady fringe in Lahore dubbed the PML(N)’s Punjab forward block. His protestations about horse-trading seem to point to this dread possibility: instead of carrying the fractured legacy of Manzoor Wattoo, the PPP might opt for a less power-hungry faction of the big PML.
Despite Mr Sharif’s doomsaying, Ms Bhutto is in with a chance to stay the course of her tenure. But she must move to alter the crisis of image the PPP is saddled with. There is a widespread perception that she has come to power for the second time without an agenda. This should not have been the case. After all, in democracies, succession to power is anticipated. It is only in dictatorships that it is accidental.