Since he came to power for the second time, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been engaged in hectic activity doing nothing much. The many challenges he accepted have gone abegging.
When he put a number of civil servants on the mat, he should have followed up by taking the good ones into confidence and putting them to work. Instead, he chose to hector the entire machinery. In reaction, bureaucrats now shun responsibility and quote rules and regulations. A colossal go-slow in the government machinery is not helping a PM saddled with stark deadlines.
Mr Sharif will learn soon enough that the rift that has occurred in the judiciary is a pyrrhic victory. The “talking judges” can’t turn the clock back on popular opinion which leans strongly in favour of independence of the judiciary. If some judges behave like civil servants, they go against the grain of this opinion. They lend themselves to the creation of a political burlesque unmindful of the role the Supreme Court was playing in the liberation of the judiciary from subordination of the government. Have the “talking judges” forgotten that they all signed the milestone March 1996 judgement, which sought to eliminate the fraud of keeping the Supreme Court haltered through the device of appointments? Seniority, a criterion ignored in the past, was tacitly reinstated in the five elevations sought by Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah.
Accountability needed to be addressed in earnest, but when Mr Sharif decreased that it should have a cut-off point, he compromised the morality of the process. Today, accountability is one-sided and vociferous and, dangerously for Mr Sharif, uncertain. Public fatigue is setting in, and if Islamabad doesn’t pull off something dramatic in Switzerland, accountability is going to recoil and hurtle back at Mr Sharif like a re-entry rocket.
The big challenge in the Punjab was sectarian terrorism. This stood between Mr Sharif and his dream of economic revival. But after opening up other fronts, he has had no time to think of what he should do with madrassas gone beserk. He set up the anti-terrorist courts whose antecedents were atrocious. When concerned citizens protested, Mr Sharif ignored them. Law minister Khalid Anwar now claims that acts of terrorism have gone down after the enforcement of Anti-Terrorism Act. We no longer believe him, after the killing of five Iranians in Rawalpindi, two in Karachi and the murder of Justice (retd) Arif Iqbal Bhatti in Lahore.
If one can be allowed to forget the Motorway for a moment, privatisation was the other big challenge Mr Sharif had accepted. He was to sell loss-making industries and banks in short order and pay off Pakistan’s big short-term loans with the proceeds. But privatisation too has bogged down. Instead, the ruling party has taken to fulminating against the former PPP government for signing bad contracts in the energy sector. No one in the cabinet realised that the contracts couldn’t be reneged on, and the rhetoric against Mr Bhutto and her corrupt husband would come home to roost. Now the government has reneged on that which it reneged: all contracts in the energy sector are to go ahead, albeit in bad faith, and the Keti Bandar project which was scrapped with much moralistic fanfare is back on line.
Much was made of the PM’s intention to normalise relations with India, but on that front too he has fumbled because he lacks the statesmanship. When the anti-India lobby and religious parties put on the warpaint, Nawaz Sharif’s weak response was to “Islamise” the electronic media, going back to what S. Z Bhutto did when concerned by the clerics. Predictably, no one has been appeased.
When a ruler in Islamabad is overwhelmed by a death-wish, he grabs Islamisation. Pakistan is already reeling under the judicial burden of bad laws in the name of Islam. A Commission headed by Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid has recommended the removal of the hudood laws, but Mr Sharif’s response is to order a more stringent Islamic gag on PTV. The PM doesn’t see the trap, as Bhutto didn’t but those who watch the political scene do: the more the government kowtows the more the fanatics feel closer to grabbing the throne in Islamabad.
The real challenge was of course the economy. All right-thinking people gave Mr Sharif two years in which to get it going. He might have been able to concentrate on this had he not been running around like a headless chicken. Seeing that nothing is working out, the PM has focused all his public-relationing on the Motorway. The goods that will “not” be produced by a collapsed industrial sector will presumably be shipped between Lahore and Islamabad on the Motorway.
Thus has the PML’s two-thirds majority in parliament become a weapon against the people of Pakistan. And Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, notwithstanding the private feelings of his “brother” judges, has emerged as the spokesman of the common man. If the judiciary has discredited itself by not standing together on the matter of national consensus, the government has violated an unspoken mandate and exposed itself to the perils of another demission. If the ship of state hits another reef in the near future, Mian Nawaz Sharif will have no one to blame but himself.