The Friday Times: Najam Sethi’s Editorial
Memogate has not lived up to the expectations of the military to serve as a vehicle for regime change, partly because the Zardari government put up stiff resistance and partly because the chief witness, Mansoor Ijaz, got cold feet. But the Supreme Court still seems in no mood to back off. It has put Memogate in cold storage while it pursues the government on the NRO track. It has indicted the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, for contempt of court and is threatening to convict and disqualify him from being a member of parliament if he doesn’t write a letter to the Swiss authorities reopening the money laundering cases against President Asif Zardari.
Next week, on Feb 13, Aitzaz Ahsan, the prime minister’s lawyer, will have a stab at appealing the indictment and, failing that, to argue for presidential immunity as a measure of the last resort. In the best-case scenario, he could get the PM and president off the hook without writing the letter. In the worst-case scenario, the PM might be convicted, the president could lose his immunity and the PPP’s coalition partners desert it in its hour of need, leading to a fresh election amidst political chaos. The probability is in-between – the PM and the president may get to save their skins, the president is adjudged to enjoy criminal but not civil immunity and the letter is written at the end of the day by the government to reopen civil proceedings against Mr Zardari in Switzerland. But it’s going to be a rocky ride because the final battle will likely extend to the wording of the letter.
The government’s strategy is clear enough. It wants to feign humility and drag the case in the SC until after the Senate elections are wrapped up in March and then flex its muscle and threaten to go down fighting as a martyred victim of the “Punjabi establishment”. But the SC has become wise to these tactics. So it will press on swiftly and relentlessly to stop the government in its tracks even at the cost of acting in “legal haste” by denying “due process” to the “elected” Prime Minister and President of Pakistan.
But the destabilizing legal battles and political wrangling have served one good purpose. They have wrought a political consensus for a transparent and free general election later in the year via a neutral election commissioner, independent election commission and bipartisan caretaker government. All the political parties realize that if they continue to squabble over this issue, the military and judiciary might conceivably join hands to cobble an altogether different political arrangement that leaves them out in the cold.
But this windfall may not be good enough. Imran Khan, who leads the “third force” for “change”, is the veritable joker in the pack who could upset the calculations of the PPP, PMLN and JUI. At the fag end of 2010, before he had cobbled an impressive support base for himself, he was gung-ho about a pact between the military and judiciary to “wrap up the corrupt system” and install a three-year interim government of technocrats to revive the economy, knock out the PPP and PMLN through accountability and pave the way for him via a “clean” general election. But now he is singing to a populist tune and exhorting the SC to knock out the PPP (because he cannot hope to woo its committed ideological voter) while he rolls up his sleeves to floor the PMLN in Punjab and JUI in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, both of which hold the conservative voter of his choice in their clutches. The truth is that Imran may be establishing a broader footprint in urban Punjab and KPI than the PMLN and JUI, and an electoral alliance with the MQM could yield dividends in urban Sindh as well. That is why he has dubbed the PPP, PMLN and JUI as the new “anti-people status quo troika” standing in the way of “real change”.
While the politicians jostle for electoral space, the economy is tanking. The latest IMF review report paints a dismal picture: “On current policies, Pakistan’s near- and medium-term prospects are not good. Growth would remain too low to absorb the large number of new entrants into the labor force, inflation would remain high, and the external position would weaken significantly. Moreover, there are considerable downside risks to this somber baseline, in the context of an increasingly fragile global environment and concerns about policy weakening ahead of senate elections in 2012 and parliamentary elections in 2013. The current mix of large fiscal deficits and accommodative monetary policy is increasingly unsustainable.”
The next elections are expected to be a three-way fight between the PPP, PMLN and PTI. A coalition government comprising any two of them seems unthinkable right now because they are poles apart in outlook. This raises the specter of renewed political instability amidst a failing economy.