As if the general election is round the corner there is a sudden spurt in the country's political temperature. Or maybe the Supreme Court's upcoming verdict on the Panamagate case has begun casting a foreshadow. Of late, the leaderships of the main political parties are out in the field, invariably accusing the rivals of betraying the confidence people had reposed in them by electing them to the assemblies in 2013. Then, there are also some almost out of the blue developments. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has undertaken visits to interior Sindh, generously handing over bags full of costly projects. The rival PPP's leader Asif Ali Zardari is in Punjab assuring his party workers that "I will not let the PML-N manoeuvre the 2018 election through returning officers." And to Imran Khan all this hot air is nothing but 'noora kushti' (fixed fight) between the PML-N and the PPP. Nawaz Sharif and Zardari have entered into a 'deal' to save each other from facing accountability, he said the other day. Imran Khan also ruled out an electoral alliance with the PPP as long it is headed by Asif Ali Zardari. If there is a deal between the PML (N) and the PPP, nothing of the sort is in public knowledge. But there is no other basis for the tinge of surrealism to the national politics. The general election is still a year and a quarter away, obviating the kind of hype that now tends to beset the national politics. Instead of rocking the boat, all three - PML (N), PPP and PTI - being in power are expected to be content with the status quo. But they are not.
What is it that is raising the political temperature? In the absence of a clear answer to this there are two plausible causes. One, the outcome of the Panamagate trial may throw up a new ballgame, necessitating the PML (N) to have a new skipper. Given that the party has absolute majority in the National Assembly it should be no problem for it to have the new one. It may have the new leader of the house, but may like to cash in on its existing goodwill and popularity than to continue with a tainted face and wither on the vine. Or the PML (N) may call for snap election. That being a possibility, the top leaders of both the PML (N) and the PPP are on the election trail. If Sindh is almost an unexplored landscape for Nawaz Sharif, for Asif Ali Zardari, Punjab is equally a hostile terrain. According to Imran Khan, the harsh words the two exchange are in line with the script their leaders have jointly authored. Both may have concluded that while they can coexist, as they have done for over a decade now, the challenge is how to deny electoral space to Imran Khan's PTI. The hard fact is that as of now even when both the PML (N) and PPP claim to be federal in reach and popularity, they are not. Nawaz Sharif's party is almost non-existent in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Asif Ali Zardari's PPP is nearly non-existent in Punjab. Rightly then, in both Sindh and Punjab, the PTI has the potential to emerge as the second most popular party, if not the first. H's no surprise if the two might have cut the "deal", as alleged by Imran Khan, and their hostile posturing may be an agreed policy.