Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s real constituency of moderate citizens is increasing restive. As the PM’s advisors lead him to a more religious direction, his supporters are quaking in their shoes. Businessmen look at religious extremism as a surrogate of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s nationalisation. While they support Mr Sharif’s anti-sectarian measures, they are unable to put their shoulder to the task of economic reconstruction until he makes a firm commitment to establishing a liberal market-friendly polity.
Pakistan’s business community is generally cosmopolitan in character and is now part of the international community of investors which our economy must attract in order to prosper. Mr Sharif’s real objective should be to rally this community around his project of saving the economy from collapse. Instead, he is precipitating an environment of fear.
His own personality is to blame for this failure. He is still stuck in the mentality of a shopkeeper who is devoted to religion, funds extremist religious outfits but votes for the Muslim League. Intellectually unsure, the PM leans on the primitive instinct to overpower institutions. Authoritarian on the one hand and orthodox on the other, he remains a true disciple of General Zia.
In his first stint, Mr Sharif appointed as DG-ISI a general who was also a member of the Tableeghi Jamaat, who then imposed his own agenda on Pakistan’s Afghanistan and Central Asia policy, throwing out of kilter and entire trade oriented and pragmatic approach that had made Nawaz Sharif an attractive leader in the first place. Mr Sharif also appointed a discredited Brig (retd) Imtiaz Ahmed as DG-IB. The Brig’s adventurism brought Pakistan to the brink of being declared a terrorist state.
Both Gen Javed Nasir and Brig Imtiaz are back. The former has been given a lucrative Auqaf job where he will no doubt fund more religious extremism. The latter has been placed at the head of NTM where he will no doubt fight the myth of Western sedition and alien penetration via the electronic media. For themselves, the PM and his media advisors have begun to purge PTV of modern cultural expression. This will help destroy the very environment Mr Sharif needs for economic revival.
His days out in the cold should have enabled Mr Sahrif to reflect on what brought him down. But even in opposition, his mindset remained the same. When a mad cleric raised the standard of revolt a couple of years ago in the Tribal Areas demanding an Islamic judiciary of extremely doubtful validity, Mr Sharif supported it. When the Lahore High Court acquitted the Christian boy Salamat Masih in a blasphemy case, Mr Sharif sided with the fanatics baying for blood outside the court. After coming to power this year, the PM;’s first courtesy call was on Dr Israr Ahmad who instructed him to become “caliph” after abolishing bank interest. Later, the same cleric queered the pitch for Mr Sharif by issuing sectarian statements and calling for the seizure of savings accounts.
It appears that Nawaz Sharif is under siege from his own primitive baggage. Qazi Hussain Ahmad has led his Jamaat-e-Islami out into the battlefield saying he will capture power by overthrowing Mr Sahrif’s “anti-shariah democracy”. Ijaz-ul-Haq has also virtually abandoned Nawaz Sharif in the name of “shariah”, despite his annual genuflection at the tomb of General Zia. A number of others close to him may also take shelter in fundamentalism as soon the PM totters on his ideological uncertain throne.
Seeing that Islamabad is weakened, Maulana Fazlur Rehman and his Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) have held a mammoth meeting in Lahore calling for the real “shariah”, a Taliban-like order for which the JUI will wage a violent campaign. This was followed by a Dawat-e-Islami gathering in Multan recently which collected over 500,000 green-turbaned followers who look forward to an Islamic revolution. The right-wing mad fringe to which the PM continues to bow has expanded and become a constituency to reckon with. The forthcoming congregation of the Dawat-ul-Irshad, collecting a million followers, will gives its routine call for the destruction of democracy. That its Lashkar-e-Taiba is fighting in Occupied Kashmir will weaken Mr Sharif further.
The rational elements in Nawaz Sharif’s personality was always weak. He cannot see that the anti-terrorist campaign he has launched has one crucial weakness: the PM is not viewed as a neutral player in the religious politics of Pakistan. He cannot see that his most significant initiative on coming to power this time, the normalisation of relations with India, has floundered not so much for the lack of a suitable Indian response as the virulent reaction from his own party. He cannot see that it is his urge for absolute power which has occasioned a crisis that has made uncertain the two years he desperately needed to put the economy right.
The irony is that the PM has no foes but himself. The challenges to Nawaz Sharif are extra-parliamentary, from the so-called religious forces to whom he makes useless obeisances. And the fact is that the more he leans in favour of fundamentalism and authoritarianism, the more he will become ripe for the plucking.