The unravelling of Nawaz Sharif seems to have begun. But to the surprise of many, the demolition work has the hallmark of a palace intrigue hatched within the extended Sharif clan.Palace intrigues are old hat in Pakistan’s arcane feudal-heavy culture. The crafty manner in which a street-smart former President Asif Zardari turned the tables on his in-laws of the Bhutto clan, on the heels of his wife, former PM Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, is a prime example of it.
However, Nawaz Sharif’s grip on both his clan and party looked ironclad-strong even in the wake of his disqualification and toppling from the pinnacle of power by the Pakistan Supreme Court. Doubts, if any, about Nawaz being unassailable under his conviction’s shadow were firmly put to rest, last month, when he defied the Cassandras to win back the crown of party leadership. Never mind that there were tongues lashing aplenty about the cloak-and-dagger operation, within the lower and upper houses of the Parliament.
So buoyed and elated was Nawaz by his rebouncing onto the centre stage that he left for London without further ado to ‘celebrate’ his triumph with his ailing wife there—a decision he may come to rue and regret soon. Nawaz may have ferreted victory from the jaws of overwhelming gloom the apex court’s verdict had apparently clamped on his political calculus. He was thumbing his nose at those who had written him off, for good, from Pakistani politics.
But Nawaz was totally clueless about the fallout from his disqualification which had triggered a silent, but decipherable, wave of disquiet and dismay among the party cadres. There were murmurs of queasiness felt by this silent sliver of party loyalists as to how the whole macabre scenario will play out with the people of Pakistan. They dared not articulate their unease in so many words but felt, just below the surface, that the stealth of their re-electing a proclaimed corrupt and tainted politician to lead the party wasn’t going to sit well with the people.
Diffidence didn’t take very long to seep within the party echelons, especially among those who had the foresight to anticipate how the voters—the same crowds guilty of elevating Nawaz to an unprecedented third stint in power—would react to Nawaz’s conviction at the next year’s general election.
Away from the scene, however, it must be farthest from Nawaz’s thoughts that the palace intrigue against him would’ve provenance within his immediate family; still remote was any sense of it that his own younger sibling and second pillar of the redoubtable Sharifs, Shehbaz, would be the one leading the charge.
As chief minister of Punjab for well over a decade, Shehbaz Sharif was well known for being the principal architect of the rise of the Sharifs in Pakistan’s largest and most populous province. But more than that, it was Shehbaz’s unquestioning loyalty to his older brother, Nawaz, that party insiders and aficionados could swear upon. The two brothers were known for being a team without any chinks in its armour. Shehbaz had the reputation of a hard taskmaster when it came to ruling Punjab with an iron fist. However, insiders insisted that he kowtowed to his older sibling like an indentured slave.
Gone, it seems, is that description of Shehbaz. Instead, his own loyalist underlings, whose ranks have been swelling since Nawaz took off for London, are now hawking his credentials as the only saviour in sight to stem the rot within the party ranks. The sentiment gaining ground in the party is that Nawaz, though re-elected as its leader, has become a liability that the party would be best off jettisoning as quickly as possible. Corruption at the highest levels of Pakistani political pyramid is becoming anathema with the people of Pakistan and Nawaz’s party is most vulnerable on that count.
Another grouse gaining momentum against Nawaz’s leadership is that he has been unabashedly promoting his daughter, Maryam, to succeed him at the cost of the party’s dwindling fortunes. An increasingly bitter and hostile intra-clan rivalry between Maryam, Nawaz’s heir-apparent, and Hamza, the son of Shehbaz Sharif, is adding fuel to the fire.
Hamza is as ambitious, and ruthless, as Maryam. But whereas Maryam has been squandering much of her limited political capital in tweeting relentlessly, a la Donald Trump, to drumbeat her disgraced father’s innocence on social media, Hamza has been busy consolidating his father’s, and his own, political base within the party rank and file.But perhaps the coup de grace against Nawaz and his incorrigibly ambitious daughter was delivered last week when the Accountability Court, trying Nawaz and his children for massive corruption and ill-begotten pelf, indicted both father and daughter. If ultimately found guilty of the charges framed against them, Nawaz and his children face the daunting prospect of long years in jail for their shenanigans.
So, what seemed like a re-birth of Nawaz, a few weeks ago, when he literally pilfered the coveted mantle of his party’s leadership, the sudden turning of the tide against him now looks, increasingly, like spelling his imminent political demise. Most pundits are inclined to write him off now that the revolt against his tainted leadership is fomented from within his immediate extended family. That’s why politics is said to be the devil’s game in which fortunes may be made and lost with the alacrity of batting an eyelid.
But there’s absolutely no guarantee that the in-house cleaning envisaged to avoid a shipwreck of the ruling Nawaz League would land the party safely on shore come elections a few months hence. All bets are off.