EDITORIAL: Political parties see nothing wrong in coming to power with a push from the establishment yet they criticise their opponents on that account as the ruling Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) coalition leaders have been doing: they are calling former prime minister Imran Khan ‘selected’. Out in the cold he is accusing the powers that be of orchestrating his ouster from power and installing an ‘imported government.’
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif upped the ante further the other day by claiming that Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan had reached out to him via a non-political mutual friend for talks regarding the appointment of next army chief, but he had rejected the offer. In his Sunday’s address to his long marchers, therefore, came the retort from Khan: “I don’t talk to boot polishers.
I’m speaking to those with whom you [Shehbaz Sharif] went to meet hiding in the trunk of car.” He also took jibes at the founding leaders of the two major parties in the ruling coalition: the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and Pakistan People’s Party. ‘I was not raised’, he said, “in a “military dictator’s nursery” like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (ZAB) who used to address Field Marshal Gen Ayub Khan as “daddy”. He accused Nawaz Sharif of offering sweeteners to Gen Jilani to become a provincial finance minister from there he climbed on the ladder to premiership by sitting at the feet of Gen Ziaul Haq.
Some of it is not entirely baseless. But to put the record straight, ZAB parted ways with Gen Ayub, leading a mass movement for the ouster of that military ruler and field marshal’s successor Gen Yahya Khan before he became President following the general election in 1970 and the breakup of Pakistan in 1971. Sharif not only stuck with Gen Zia till his demise, even afterwards he vowed to fulfil the general’s ‘mission’ — whatever that might be. He is believed to have come into power in 1990 and received ‘heavy mandate’ in the ’97 election with the establishment’s help.
A former ISI chief, retired general Asad Durrani, affirmed that impression in an affidavit he filed before the Supreme Court in the Asghar Khan case in 2019, admitting that he had bankrolled leaders of the IJI (Islami Jamhoori Ittehad), including Sharif, to prevent the then prime minister Benazir Bhutto from winning the ’90 election. As for Khan, he is right in claiming that he is not a product of any ‘military dictator’s nursery’. Nonetheless, pre-election political engineering on his behalf is widely assumed to have played a significant role in his party, the PTI, winning enough National Assembly seats in the 2018 election for him to form a coalition government.
However, all prime ministers have complained of having responsibility without authority. They are to blame themselves for it. The establishment is a player in power dynamics because almost all politicians have sought its support at one point or another for the attainment of their respective political objectives. It is about time leaders of all political parties looked beyond their short-term interests and stopped feuding with one another. Squabbling only creates political instability, dragging the powers that be into the fray as at present, outsourcing resolution of a purely political issue: an election date. They would be wise to sit together and sort out this issue. Unfortunately, however, there is no sign of them alighting on an agreement.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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