General Pervez Musharraf has always said he wants to rule Pakistan for at least five more years without contending with Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif. With a dubious referendum in his pocket to anoint himself president and a plethora of discriminatory laws in his clutch to empower himself, have Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif been personally sidelined altogether?
On the play of the dice so far, it would seem so. Mr Sharif has bitten the bullet and handed the crown of the PML(N) to Shahbaz Sharif. Ms Bhutto has been equally pragmatic, sidestepping the hurdles and clearing the way for the PPP via the PPPP. Both believe it is better to live and fight another day than to fight and lose today. But it didn’t have to turn out this way at all.
General Zia ul Haq had a personal and political contradiction with Ms Bhutto and the PPP in the 1980s. So he wooed the PML and nurtured a compliant Nawaz Sharif. His successors in the “1990s establishment” followed the same policies. But the tables were turned in 1999 when General Musharraf acquired a personal and political contradiction with Mr Sharif and the PML when he exiled the leader and hounded the party until it yielded a potentially pro-Musharraf faction. Thus it should have made sense for the army/establishment and Ms Bhutto/PPP to embrace each other at the expense of their joint Sharif/PML nemesis.
But that didn’t happen. General Musharraf’s anti-corruption, self righteous, reformist zeal compelled him to put Ms Bhutto in the same dock as Mr Sharif even as his moderate leanings and pragmatic assessment of the “ground realities” prompted a possible “understanding” with her powerful party. Indeed, an “alliance” with the PPP without Ms Bhutto seemed all the more necessary to the military when the PML(Q) faction, while being stoutly anti-Nawaz, failed to transform itself into a significant pro-Musharraf force. But Ms Bhutto miscalculated the balance of her dormant power over the voter with the budding influence of General Musharraf with the organs of the state and the international community. She mishandled the initial probes, laying down conditions for an alliance with General Musharraf that were unacceptable to the military. Having lumped the offer, she thought sounding-off in relevant international quarters might yield dividends. This strategy might well have worked if September 11 hadn’t happened. But when Mullah Omar and OBL came to General Musharraf’s rescue, he changed his spots and transformed himself from an international pariah into a “trusted friend and ally” of the West who could do no wrong. Now the boot was on the other foot. And it was time to make amends with him.
But Ms Bhutto couldn’t bring herself to be sugar and honey. She continued to stalk the corridors of international power, bemoaning the lack of democracy in the country and thundering against the military for spawning the terrorism of jehad. However, her fatal political error came when she tried to nudge Nawaz Sharif in Saudi Arabia into a united front against the military. Alarmed, the ISI quickly winked at Shahbaz Sharif and thwarted an unholy alliance. In defiance, Ms Bhutto got herself elected as chairperson of the PPP. But the cynics in Islamabad put paid to that by threatening to outlaw her party if it tried to contest the general elections under her leadership. Thus the Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians (PPPP) was midwifed with Ms Bhutto as its “guide” and Makhdoom Amin Fahim as its president. It is a measure of the last resort by a popular though tainted political leader whose claims to legitimacy have been frustrated by an apathetic public and wounded by an illegitimate though uncorrupted military dictator bent upon clinging to power by the coattails of the international community.
But if Ms Bhutto hasn’t succeeded in scaling the heights of Islamabad, the Sharifs are far from sneaking into the hallowed halls of parliament. Mr Shahbaz Sharif, says the government, will not be allowed to return to the country. But there is no doubt that the linear-thinking generals, especially those from the Punjab, have a soft corner for Sharif Jr. because of his carefully orchestrated reputation for good administration. But if he is allowed to return and freely canvass for his party while Ms Bhutto is arrested at the airport, the halo of renewed martyrdom for her should give an enormous boost to the PPPP and undermine the credibility and neutrality of the military regime as well as the legitimacy of the polls to come, an outcome General Musharraf may well wish to avoid.
The truth probably is that General Musharraf would be happiest with Benazir Bhutto and Shahbaz Sharif and Altaf Hussain canvassing for their respective parties from London rather than Lahore or Karachi so that the PPPP and the PML(N) and the MQM are equally disadvantaged, thereby enabling the PML(Q) and other regional parties and religious groups to stake small but significant claims in the upcoming new order and denying any of the two mainstream parties a majority in parliament.
That said, there are miles to go before any of the protagonists will know for sure what fate has in store for him or her. But it promises to be a first rate tragi-comedy.