The Pakistan Muslim League under Nawaz Sharif has experienced another potentially destabilising development — its imprisoned “leader” has issued orders that are flexible, vague and mysterious. The net result is greater confusion than cohesion in the party.
On July 30, the PML’s rank and file, mobilised by Kulsoom Nawaz and the ‘new’ young leadership coalesced around her, roughed up the two dissident leaders Mian Azhar and Fakhr Imam outside the Muslim League office. Inside the session, Mr Sharif’s statement did not mention Raja Zafar-ul-Haq who is in charge of the Coordination Committee of the party. Instead, a light-weight like Ahsan Iqbal was vaguely put in charge of the new mobilisation campaign desired by the leader. Furthermore, even as Raja Zafarul Haq’s clique was assuaged by allowing it to pursue “sincere” negotiations with the military government of General Pervez Musharraf, no effort was made to rein in the gung-ho faction led by Kulsoom Nawaz.
In the event, the PML’s July 30 meeting in Islamabad has put paid to the power of the dissidents. It has voted overwhelmingly for retaining Nawaz Sharif as president and refused to consider the dissident demand for an Acting President and fresh party elections. But this ambivalence, could, in fact, be a carefully cultivated one, containing the seeds of confrontation rather than reconciliation.
Nawaz Sharif certainly shocked most Leaguers by telling them that the PML would not take part in the coming local bodies elections. This means that Mr Sharif does not wish to grant legitimacy to the acts of the Musharraf government — the PML is, after all, best placed, at least in the majority province of Punjab, to win the non-party polls, the party machinery having primed itself for over a decade for exactly such an opportunity. He sees the induction into local government as a reduction of the momentum he wants to build up against his long prison sentence and the longer disqualification period he must suffer. He believes, quite rightly, that most Muslim Leaguers who end up supporting the new local institutions will inevitably come under their spell and forget him in the bargain.
The other message, that of joining the All-Parties Conference (APC) and the reference by name to Benazir Bhutto as part of the ‘democratic’ order, put off many loyalists and dissidents. This was to be expected. Mr Sharif has nurtured the PML(N) on a private hatred and public persecution of the PPP and its Bhutto-Zardari leadership. But the APC comprises parties who largely want the PML and PPP purged from the system before a National Government is set up to hold the next elections. The APC of August 6 in fact ended up destroying the one plank on which the PML was united: restoration of PML-dominated assemblies.
Obviously, Nawaz Sharif has only one thing on his mind — incarceration leading to political oblivion. Therefore he can only seek to build up pressure on the government to let him off the hook. This means that his PML must be arm-twisted to stay away from any process that might cool its passion for confrontation. Is he likely to succeed in his mission?
Certainly, the dissidents who wanted to topple Nawaz Sharif from the presidency of the PML have bitten the dust again. The PML has not only held together, newspaper surveys show that Mr Sharif is still the citizens’ choice for the party’s leadership. Why hasn’t the PML gone the way it has always gone in the past when challenged by the army?
The truth is that this time around there is no Nawaz Sharif in the second-rung leadership of the PML as there was when Mohammad Khan Junejo was removed by General Zia ul Haq. The truth also is that General Pervez Musharraf is no General Zia, ready, able and willing to publicly shower his blessings on the chosen replacement. And the truth is that if the party leadership has deep fissures, the dissidents barely have their own constituencies in hand, habituated as they are to linkages within the old Establishment. Finally, they are all at risk from the government’s accountability drive and any place outside the party fortress would be unsafe for them if and when NAB decides to prosecute them.
They say that time heals wounds. But time could equally widen the lacerations received by the PML. The loyalty Sharif is evoking in the party is the kind of loyalty he had striven for, not of principles but of personal benefit. But as he lives out his sentence in jail and even sits out the next election, this loyalty is sure to fade. And as his family’s ability to look after the loyalists diminishes (its cohesion is already damaged by Shahbaz Sharif’s conscientious dissent) the vested interests looking to him for survival are bound to latch on to other supports.
Nawaz Sharif may be a non-entity in the coming years. But he could find some solace in the fact that the years in the wilderness for him, as for Benazir Bhutto, may well prove intractable for Pakistan’s state and economy.