Talking to Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif can be a frustrating experience. Neither is short of whimsical answers or fanciful solutions. Both are brimming with confidence or self-righteousness. Ms Bhutto is convinced that she’s running a fairly good ship, the only problem is that her media managers have not been able to get her message across to the people. Mr Sharif thinks she’s made a mess of things and is incapable of governance. She thinks that because the President is with her and because the army isn’t against her she’s here to stay. He thinks she’s living in a fool’s paradise and is on the way out. Tragically, there is no meeting of minds at any level.
Mr Sharif is ready to cooperate with the devil, if necessary, to get rid of Ms Bhutto. He’s even prepared to live with martial law. His argument is that if martial law is imposed it must come to an end sooner rather than later. When that day dawns, he is hoping that she will have disappeared from the scene while he will still be around to pick up the threads of power. It is a foolish and dangerous analysis that he is flogging.
In consequence, Ms Bhutto’s attitude towards Mr Sharif has progressively hardened. She is now ready to use all her wits to cut him down to size. Therefore she has had no qualms in hoisting her government in the NWFP, exploiting the lack of any anti-defection laws to strengthen her power base and getting on with the business of legislation during the opposition’s boycott of parliament. She’s also determined to put the economy on the “right track” by reducing government spending, enlarging the tax base, lowering the fiscal deficit and developing long-gestation projects in the public sector. She says that the belt-tightening period will be over in a couple of years. After her policies have begun to yield fruit, she will be in a good position to call fresh elections and win another term in power. It is a slippery path that she is treading.
In a rather perverse sort of way, Mr Sharif approves of her economic strategy. He believes that it is ideally designed to alienate her from the people and bring her crashing down. His hope is that after a tough budget is announced, the people in the urban areas, especially the trading classes, can be egged on to spark a country-wide protest and plunge her government into a crisis. If Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad can be brought to a halt, the deed is as good as done, or so he thinks.
Doesn’t it all sound rather depressing and hopeless? We have experimented with two long bouts of martial law, we have licked the election trail three times in the last five years. But what have we achieved? The tragedy is that we have come full circle and arrived at the beginning, only to discover that it might not be a beginning after all.
Unfortunately, the bitter struggle for power has not only crippled the economy, it has also seriously impaired the institutions of the state. The civil bureaucracy is demoralised, the judiciary is gasping for breath. Even the armed forces are unsure of their position, especially in Sindh. As the two main parties blindly slug it out, the marginal clusters in society — religious sects, ethnic groups, tribal assemblies in the periphery — are beginning to acquire a larger-than-life profile that can prove extremely harmful to civil society.
No state structure can endure in such circumstances. The lack of a minimum consensus in society over how to resolve the nuclear deadlock with America or how to tackle the Kashmir issue with India or how to manage the economy efficiently or how to conduct fair elections or how to hold government and politicians accountable, for example, has only made matters so much worse.
Of course, Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif are both wrong if they think that they can make do without the other. If Ms Bhutto is unable to bring Mr Sharif to the negotiating table, the loss will be hers. But it will also be a tragedy for us. If Mr Sharif is able to overthrow her government, his victory will be Pyrrhic, But it will be also be a tragedy for us. If there is life after Benazir Bhutto, it might well be without Nawaz Sharif.
In this context, it may be instructive to recall the significance of the brief Moeen Qureshi interregnum. Mr Qureshi stepped in to stop the rot when all seemed lost. Within three months he proved that, given transparently good and neutral leadership, the people were prepared to make sacrifices. “If only he could have continued….” remains a refrain to this day.
Moeen Qureshi has gone and is not likely to return. But the metaphor remains. By the time it loses its vitality and becomes a cliche, Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif might both have vanished from the scene. Given the current deadlock, it is a thought many Pakistanis could live with rather comfortably. For starters, this is something both our youthful protagonists might consider in all seriousness before they begin to flex their muscle over the coming budget.