Chief Minister Mian Manzoor Ahmad Wattoo has a legislature where there is a large hostile PML(N) opposition and a large chunk of PPP members who are increasingly alienated from him. The city too is not his. In the post-budget days, as PML(N) gets ready to use the whip-saw on the PPP with the help of the Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the PDF is boiling over with its own inner contradictions. Mr Wattoo couldn’t have done much to sell the budget to the shopkeepers of Lahore where the rising crime graph is already a rebuke he can’t ignore.
The PPP MPAs in Lahore are now talking to journalists about how Wattoo is ‘not our chief minister’ Their ‘senior minister’ Makhdum Altaf Ahmad, presiding over the finances of the provinces, is swearing he won’t let the government splurge in conditions of indebtedness (Rs 80 billion). He is being unreliably quoted over the billion rupees Mr Wattoo wants to spend in his constituency in these days for financial duress, and the 20 crore rupees aircraft he wants the Governor to buy so he could use it. As for the other easy pickings, the provincial economy is a wrinkled prune already squeezed dry by Mr Wattoo’s IJI-PML predecessors. Development authorities in Lahore (LDA) Faisalabad (FDA) and Multan (MDA) are all in the hock owing Rs 24 crores each in salaries’ overdraft, the Lahore one being under investigation for the cruel gouging Mian Nawaz Sharif subjected to it when he was master of all he surveyed.
PPP’s Punjab satrap has not able to live down his clever chiseller’s reputation. Islamabad could put up with it if his dominance over the provincial bureaucracy were to yield a better law-and-order situation. Violent crime has shot up and stayed up, affecting high-profile citizens too. The dacoits are not caught in the act but the police often are. Newspapers say almost a dozen of the SHOs posted in the city are known criminals, one of them a proclaimed offender who has been reappointed despite court strictures.
PML(J) was the decisive make-weight in Punjab which yielded the province to Ms Benazir Bhutto. The PDF was supposed to reap the benefit of the political entropy called ‘lotacracy’ in vulgar parlance. Forward blocs and independents were supposed to swell the ranks of the ruling coalition, as is the wont in our parts, but the question is, whose ranks, the PPP’s or the PML(J)’s? One development that proved the PPP had no good leadership in the province was the gravitation of the ‘undecided’ to Mr Wattoo’s magic circle. As his slice of the house increased Mr Wattoo’s confidence increased too. He talked to Islamabad rather than to the PPP in Lahore. His demands for special funds also became more emphatic.
Islamabad is supposed to have the advantage of the ‘full picture’. The Presidency and the PM’s house see Mian Nawaz Sharif rampant in this full picture. They see in the cunning of Mian Manzoor Wattoo an equal response but a poorly PPP in Punjab cannot match. But Islamabad is also uneasy about the ‘slippage’ Mr Wattoo is causing in the power of the PPP here. Governor Altaf Hussain makes nothing of the Wattoo clout: he is supposed to be able to attract PML(N) stragglers and repentant PML(J) ex-independents to the PPP and thus cause an ‘internal’ transition of power in the Punjab Assembly, replacing Mr Wattooo with a PPP chief minister. Makhdoom Altaf seems to be presenting a similar possible scenario provided Islamabad acquiesces in it.
Islamabad will find it difficult to acquiesce in this scenario. It must have residual fatigue from the Peshawar exercise of not along ago. President Leghari, much hassled by PML(N)’s campaign against him since he let the Peshawar thing happen, would rather let Wattoo be. Everyone knows Wattoo can dissolve the Punjab Assembly ‘in extremis’. Last time he did that, however, the Lahore High Court said he hadn’t done it right. Islamabad may have made ‘suitable’ changes in Lahore’s high judiciary last week to leash Wattoo, but a victory like that will look worse than defeat. Thus, if Wattoo dissolves and re-elections are held, PML(N) sweeps back to power; if PPP makes government on the basis of a new majority in Lahore, and sews that up with an anti-defection ordinance, PML(N) starts looking more morally superior than it does now.
What may be in the offing is another unclean act of Pakistani politics. Once again we may be treated to a gallery of bespattered politicians looking helpless in the face of the inevitable. Had Mr Wattoo demonstrated the efficiency he was reputed to possess, the change could be resisted; but as things are, some king of jogging of the political kaleidoscope seems inevitable. There are other ‘powers-that-be’ kind of people in Pakistan who too see the ‘full picture’, and in that ‘full picture’ democracy itself may be seen to be coming unstuck in Pakistan.