In Gilgit last week, Mian Nawaz Sharif recalled his encounter with the PPP workers in Rawalpindi moments after the assassination of Ms Benazir Bhutto on the evening of Dec 27, 2007. Mian Sahib reminded the Gilgitis that the grieving PPP workers wanted him to avenge Ms Bhutto’s death.

The reiteration was consistent with the new Sharifian philosophy that seeks to cast the PML-N chief as the true heir to not only Ms Bhutto’s popular legacy but also to that of her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Do not we know that it was Mr Bhutto who had initiated the bomb and Mr Sharif who had completed the job? A more charitable view of the Sharif politics sees him exacting his revenge on all those who had long decried him as a dictator’s heir. He smiles at the mention of how those who had fought one dictator (Zia) have been found seeking favours from another (Musharraf). So far, Mian Sahib’s happens to be the last laugh.

What doesn’t amuse too many is the analysis that the PML-N chief has no intention of destabilising the existing democratic system. Here a distinction has to be made between what someone wants to do and what he can. The theory is that if the existing dispensation is disturbed, politicians as a group will suffer and power will be snatched from them.

Consequently, what we are saying is that certain politicians would have responded differently if the situation had afforded them a clear passage to the royal palaces in Islamabad.

That room for improvement will come, eventually. This may not be a cricket match but it is still about partnerships. President Asif Ali Zardari has been bowling too many full tosses to Mr Sharif and there is tremendous pressure on the PML-N head from the members of the old establishment to signal the start of the slog, power-play overs.

A few scores are to be settled here. Accounts from everywhere confirm that we are in a state of revenge. It is hard to find someone who is not out to avenge himself. So much so that we are playing New Zealand in the UAE not to enjoy, or provide entertainment or to exhibit our skills, or to win. We have to punish the Kiwis for their offence of knocking us out of the recently held Champions Trophy in South Africa.

But that is a milder model of revenge-taking, even milder than the intrigues the national side may be beset with. Much more sinister versions of the revenge genre are being practised with either pomp or fury or both in the country.

The Taliban are laden with revenge as they go after the West and whoever appears to them to be siding with it. A political representation of the anti-American sentiment is found in the conduct of the maulanas who are keen on holding a referendum against Kerry’s much awaited lungar for Pakistanis but have no inclination to use their cadres to guard against the terrorists on the streets.

For now, their demand is that the Americans should pack up and leave, which hardly inspires any hope that they would stop spitting fire if and when the US grants them their wish. They were in the same mood before the American occupation. The discourse leaves little room for the thought that they will ever let go of their easy target. Only the local recipient of their ire may change with time.

Among all revenge victims, the most curious case is that of the thousands of local bodies representatives who have been made useless because those who are in power treat them as the unwanted children of the Musharraf regime. These councillors and nazims, numbering more than 2,000 in Lahore alone, could have come in handy in our war against terrorism.

They were/are best placed to knit together citizens’ watch and ward groups against the terrorists. Only they are unacceptable to today’s well-behaving democrats. Interior Minister Rehman Malik is at pains to highlight the need for a vigilant and organised people to thwart the designs of the terrorists, yet these councillors, firmly rooted in society as they may be, continue to be ignored as pariahs.

This is almost criminal given the fact that not a single day passes without us mourning the death of the surveillance system that we once supposedly had. Forget the room at the top, what we need most urgently is a partnership at the grassroots.