Mr Nawaz Sharif recently expressed a willingness to talk to Benazir Bhutto over issues of national security, including a constitutional amendment package to streamline the rules of the game. Ms Bhutto welcomed Mr Sharif’s “initiative” and said she would summon her party’s big-wigs on July 27 to formulate an appropriate response. At the same time, there was news about the possibility of some sort of rapprochement between the PPP and the MQM. President Farooq Leghari was reported to have met with Senator Ishtiaq Ahmad and the PPP’s Pervez Ali Shah was despatched to London to hold talks with Altaf Hussain. ‘At last!’, thought some people, ‘the confrontation between opposition and government which has paralysed the political system may be about to end’.
Of course, there is no such thing in the offing. On the contrary, both sides seem to have dug in their heels for another round of fisticuffs. Mr Sharif is threatening to launch a ‘long march’ to Islamabad on August 17 and Ms Bhutto is getting set to prosecute certain PML(N) stalwarts for ‘treason’. And in Karachi, the factional warfare within the MQM has spilled over into violent sectarian strife. What is going on? When and where will it all end?
A stock-taking of events, perceptions, strategies and counter-strategies reveals a number of players vying for political leverage. Among these may be counted the PML(N), the two Altaf and Afaq factions of the MQM, the GHQ, India, and, of course, the PPP government. This is how the cards have been dealt.
Benazir Bhutto began her second stint as prime minister by offering an olive branch to Nawaz Sharif. ‘Come’, she said to Mr Sharif, ‘let us sit down and hammer out the rules of the game. Let us jointly amend the constitution so that floor-crossing is prohibited, so that the 8th amendment is banished, so that women are given greater representation in parliament, so that a new election commission is constituted which can hold genuinely free elections in 1998’. But this offer was spurned by Mr Sharif without a moment’s thought. Why did he do that?
Since his ouster from power last year, thanks to Ms Bhutto’s cunning strategy of playing off the prime minister against the president, Nawaz Sharif has come to believe passionately that Benazir Bhutto cannot be trusted to keep her word. Consequently, soon after the elections, Mr Sharif was persuaded by his colleagues that if Ms Bhutto wasn’t packed off as quickly as possible, she would eventually be able to lure PML(N) MNAs and MPAs to her camp, consolidate political power, win the next elections and bury the PML(N) for all times to come. That is why Mr Sharif decided he would use all means, foul or fair, to destabilise and topple her government as quickly as possible.
The opposition’s mood and strategy was not lost on Ms Bhutto. So she began by dangling the floor-crossing ordinance before Mr Sharif. ‘Live and let live’ she advised, ‘talk, or else’ she warned. When Mr Sharif showed no sign of relenting, she moved to cover one of her flanks immediately. The NWFP opposition was duly weakened and the PPP seized power in the NWFP, thanks to President Farooq Leghari’s intervention.
Instead of chastening Mr Sharif, this action merely served to confirm his worst suspicions about Ms Bhutto. ‘The woman is power-hungry and will stop at nothing to demean me or to belittle the opposition’, he thought. He was now also clear about what needed to be done next: erode the President’s credibility so that Mr Leghari would have to think twice before exercising his authority against the opposition again. Enter Mehrangate. Much mutual mud-slinging and acrimony followed, leading to a further souring of PPP-PML(N) relations.
It was time, therefore, for Ms Bhutto to cover her second flank. Hand-picked judges were appointed by the government to oversee the superior judiciary. Simultaneously, the implications of the pending appointment of a new chief election commissioner were conveyed to Mr Sharif. ‘Talk, or else’, seemed, once again, to be the message from Islamabad.
‘Nothing doing’, retorted a bitterly hostile Mr Sharif, ‘the judiciary has been usurped by the PPP’, he thundered. Traders and businessmen, who are traditionally anti-PPP, were accordingly nudged by the opposition to strike against the government’s budget. And contacts were activated with the perennially bristling religious parties to attack the government over the blasphemy laws and force it on the back foot.
But Ms Bhutto had advanced too far ahead to take this fresh challenge lying down. So she took one step back (she appeased the traders and the fundos by diluting the harsh provisions of the budget and promising not to change the anti-blasphemy laws) and two steps forward (the public sector banks were ordered to foreclose the financial options of Mr Sharif, Chaudry Shujaat and other opposition leaders while the Punjab Governor was instructed to prepare cases against Mr Sharif for “misuse of authority” while he was in power.
A desperate ‘long march’ on Islamabad by the opposition had now become inevitable. So mass rallies were organised and Mr Sharif had no option but to publicly commit himself to toppling Ms Bhutto’s government ‘before the year is out’.
Meanwhile, in Karachi, the political situation continued to deteriorate. Ms Bhutto offered a coalition government to the MQM(A) on condition that Mr Altaf Hussain should repudiate terrorism and come back to face the criminal charges against him (mostly lodged before she became prime minister). But Mr Hussain was been in no mood to oblige, egged on as he was by Mr Sharif to defy the government. However, fearing a possible deal between the MQM(A) and the PPP, the MQM(Haqiqi) faction decided to stake its own claims by fueling the on-going bloody strife within the MQM.
With civil disobedience at full throttle in Pakistan, India has probably seen a good opening to avenge the ‘Pakistani hand’ in Kashmir. So a couple of bombs have exploded near Shia Imam Bargahs and a busload of Shias was gunned down by unknown assailants last week. What a perfect recipe to fan violent sectarianism in Pakistan’s most important industrial city and only port, one which is already crippled by ethnic strife, power shortages and general lawlessness. In view of all this disorder, the position taken by GHQ, the office of the last resort, merits comment.
General Abdul Waheed, the army chief, was a reluctant player last year when he was obliged to break the political gridlock by backing the demand for fresh elections under a neutral government. Obviously, GHQ must have hoped that the people would return a strong and stable government which would put the political system and the economy on the rails again. The COAS was also keen to see the PPP and MQM hammer out a political solution to the problems of Karachi and Sindh so that the army could be withdrawn from the province.
There has been no such luck on any front. On the contrary, the bitter war between the government and the opposition is beginning to hurt the cause of national security. The fact that Pakistan is unable to articulate a consensus over Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, Afghanistan and a host of other security-related issues must irk GHQ. How could it sit back and allow this situation to continue? What could it possibly do to knock some sense into the politicians?
It is speculated that a discreet ‘message’ may have been recently conveyed to Mr Sharif and Ms Bhutto that it would be in the country’s national interest if the two leaders could at least sit down and agree not to rock the boat on national-security related issues. If this is so, we can perfectly understand why Mr Sharif was suddenly compelled to claim that he was ready to negotiate a package of ideas with Ms Bhutto. It also explains why Ms Bhutto immediately welcomed the opposition’s offer of talks. Neither politician wanted to be seen in GHQ as being intransigent or bloody-minded over matters that concern the armed forces.
Why then, one might ask, has the initiative not borne fruit as expected? Why is Mr Sharif rushing around trying to organise his ‘long march’ and why has Ms Bhutto gone ahead and arrested the former head of the Intelligence Bureau and Mr Sharif’s right-hand man, Brig (retd) Imtiaz Ahmad?
The fact is that Mr Sharif has never budged an inch from his perception that the sooner Ms Bhutto is ousted the better it is for him in the long run. Continued confrontation suits the PML(N) and hurts the PPP. Thus, even as Mr Sharif was claiming that he was ready for conditional talks with Ms Bhutto, even as secret mediators and emissaries were to-ing and fro-ing between Lahore and Islamabad, there was no let-up in Mr Sharif’s rhetoric against the government. The gesture of conciliation was apparently made by Mr Sharif with the full knowledge that the talks would, and should, not be consummated with Ms Bhutto. Now he can turn around and say to the army generals that he did his bit for reconciliation but failed to evoke a proper response from the government. In other words, blame the government for the continuing impasse.
If GHQ’s initiative has not taken off, what should it do? Under the circumstances, there is no possibility that some such thing as a National Security Council, which includes leaders of the opposition, can take off. Short of imposing martial law there seems to be precious little that GHQ can do about the political deadlock. Since General Waheed is not inclined to take such a plunge, the best thing for him would be to sit back and crunch his teeth.
Maybe that’s the only way out. The MQM is engaged in a violent cleansing of its ranks. Maybe its leaders will see reason once their militant elements have wiped one another out. Similarly, the battle between Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif, as long as the army doesn’t intervene, is fated to go against the latter. On its own, even if it can persuade the people to march to Islamabad, the opposition cannot topple the PPP government. Mr Sharif & Co’s wits are no match for the repressive power of the state. Once Mr Sharif has huffed and puffed with all his might and seen his efforts come to nought, he might well be in a more realistic frame of mind to consider the legitimacy of Ms Bhutto’s right to complete her five year term in office.