May 03, 2008

EMERGING at the end of three days of intense, damage-control, talks with Pakistan's current man-of-destiny, PPP's Asif Zardari, Mian Nawaz Sharif could well have said to the assembled media in Dubai, on what was the International Labour Day, May 1, that it was all love's labour lost. Instead, he put the best spin he could on the inconclusive talks to save the day, claiming that all was well, in typically Pakistan-style of hedging the bets. However, his body language said the opposite: Zardari had taken him for a ride and was playing hide-and-seek with him.

The 30-day deadline, which expired on Wednesday, was the centrepiece of the Murree or Bhurban Declaration signed by them. Which prompts the obvious question: if the deadline, so solemnly committed and proclaimed sanctimoniously by the two leaders, couldn’t be kept, is there still life left for the grand coalition? Or is it going to wither on the vine, as it threatens to, now that the cornerstone of the grand alliance has been uprooted and hacked away?Zardari, the undisputed kingmaker stalking the political landscape of Pakistan with cool confidence (over-confidence, to some) is still upbeat and bullish about the survival and continuity of his understanding with ‘brother Nawaz Sharif.’ To him, the 30-day commitment to restore the hounded judges to their positions was not sacrosanct; it wasn’t something that should rock the boat with Nawaz and send the budding experiment of shared power under a democratic dispensation hurtling down to choppy waters.

Cool as a cucumber in a recent TV interview, he was nonchalant on keeping his date with the deadline. Heavens wouldn’t fall in his book if there were a delay of a few weeks in repositioning the deposed judges to where they were on November 2. But it shouldn’t be an end in itself. According to his logic and thought, it should be an integral part of a judicial reform package.

There is little room to lock horns with him on the need for judicial reforms in the country. After all, the top judiciary didn’t have many feathers in its cap until Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry summoned up enormous courage to stand up to the autocrat. The history of our top judiciary before March 9, 2007, wasn’t an edifying one, or something that posterity could be proud of. On the contrary, it had too many rogues and villains.

But there was no such charm offensive in the interview he earlier recorded for BBC, and in which he bared his knuckles as well as his tongue that spewed quite a slug of vitriol against Iftikhar Chaudhry, whom he berated for playing politics, now as well as before.

Will the real Zardari please stand up?

Which of the two Zardaris, successively projected on BBC and Geo, should be taken as the one speaking his mind? Zardari came out gunning for Iftikhar Chaudhry in his BBC encounter. The body language clearly portrayed a man with a personal axe to grind with the sequestered CJ. Which only proves what many a pundit have been saying: that he has about as much, or as little, appetite to see Chaudhry restored to his November 2 position as has Musharraf. There were quite a few loaded quips and comments about the judges, even in his later interview, clearly betraying strong personal reservations of the ‘kingmaker’ to have Chaudhry restored without any strings attached. He was bitter, almost belligerent, that he didn’t get justice from CJ Chaudhry despite making five appearances before him in the court.

Zardari, in fact, insisted that his mandate wasn’t getting the judges restored; it was Roti, Kapra aur Makan, the mantra that PPP has been harping on since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made it into a catchall slogan in his time. Zardari wants to make it as much his signature tune as it was of Zulfi Bhutto’s or BB’s.

He was also frank in pontificating his total non-commitment on the issue of the long-incarcerated Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ‘father’ of the Pakistani bomb. Shrugging his shoulders, he said he wasn’t the one who put Dr Khan in detention and will not be the one to release him: as simple as that. But it is more than what meets the eye. It means the new civilian government is not being allowed to have something to do with matters relating to nuclear assets as has been the case with previous civilian governments.

So, there’s hardly any doubt, with the benefit of these two interviews before us, that he is in no hurry to rehabilitate the 60-odd judges, in general, and Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, in particular. If at all he agrees to make himself a party to it, he would rather do it on his terms than on anybody else’s.

That’s not what his chief coalition partner Nawaz Sharif may be prepared to accept or even countenance. To his detractors Nawaz may be hoist with his own petard on the judges’ issue. That may well be the case. But, then, Nawaz and his party did so splendidly well in heartland Punjab, his bastion of popularity, largely because he took a crystal-clear stand on the judiciary. He wants it restored, with no strings attached, back to exactly where it was on November 2. Period.

There’s hardly any wiggle room in the high moral stand Nawaz and his League have taken so forthrightly into their stride. To step back from it would make them look unprincipled opportunists, which they have no wish to be painted into. No wonder they are so desperate to see some movement on the issue, and as quickly as the Murree accord envisaged.

That explains why Nawaz first dispatched younger brother Shehbaz to Dubai to confer with Zardari there, and then quickly followed his trail there when Zardari still remained unmoved. There’s nary a doubt that Zardari has been playing hardball on the issue of restoring the judges, in particular Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, because his thinking on this front has a lot in common with that of the establishment, including President Musharraf. Zardari worries about the unpredictability of what a restored Justice Chaudhry may do to Musharraf’s stage-managed ‘re-election.’ And if Musharraf faces his day at the bar then his NRO may go out with him, and with it Zardari would be back to square one.

On the other hand, Justice Abdul Hamid Dogar has been so helpful to Zardari all along, not only by upholding the NRO but also removing the last roadblock of graduation requirement for him to contest election to the National Assembly. The road is all clear for the kingmaker to become the king himself at a time of his choosing, though he may deny such an intention at this moment. It makes sense for Zardari to lean on the side of an accommodating Justice Dogar than go out on a limb for an inconvenient Justice Chaudhry.

There are straws in the wind, already, to suggest that Zardari is planning for the post-Nawaz cooperation period. His eagerness to have MQM on board with him is a categorical manifestation of that. A power sharing deal for Sindh has already been concluded (but no signed on paper this time) with the MQM. The next logical step would be a similar deal with it for the centre.

This scribe had predicted in these very columns, in the heat of the PPP-PML-N camaraderie, that Zardari would want to have a fallback option, just in case the marriage of convenience didn’t work out. Even at that stage when the romance with PML-N had just started sprouting he wasn’t ruling out a power-sharing entente with MQM, to the chagrin of Nawaz and his team. Now he is simply putting teeth to his pre-emptive design.

How does all this affect Nawaz Sharif?

Not drastically. Not much, by any stretch of imagination. His base in Punjab is secure and leaving the government at the federal level on high moral ground could only add to his and his party’s popularity in its core power base. Punjab is the heart of the movement for the restoration of an independent judiciary and Nawaz Sharif is already the principal beneficiary of the people’s trust because of his forthright stand.

Zardari may reap an early windfall in the game of raw power but could well be the loser in the long run. He would be taking a huge risk for the moral standing of the PPP in the whole of Pakistan, in general, but pointedly in Punjab, in particular, by dragging his feet on the judges’ restoration, or trying to tailor the high judiciary to his specifications and designs. Machiavellian cunning may yield good dividends in the short run, but in terms of strategy over a long period it usually comes a cropper.

The fact that he removed himself from the scene in Pakistan — where all the action is — at such a critical hour and decamped in Dubai speaks for itself. But politics is the art of the possible and anyone with an iota of feeling for the new democratic dispensation in Pakistan will only be praying for a miracle to salvage the situation.

The writer is a former ambassador.