Enough is enough and the lines are clearly drawn. Breaking his four-year silence, politically-charged President Asif Ali Zardari finally retaliated with full force, taking the belligerent Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) chief Nawaz Sharif and his party head-on, blasting them for a smear campaign against him in and outside parliament besides “attacking” the institutions of national security.
His address to the party leaders at Naudero on Tuesday can be seen as a supreme commander defending the armed forces and at the same time as a co-chairman of the ruling party paying his political rivals back in the same coin. His tone and tenor were that of a demagogue who not only challenged his adversaries and detractors but also came down hard on media “seths” and anchorpersons, who in his lingo were “political actors”.
Though the political conduct of Mr Zardari as president of the country can be questioned after the Lahore High Court (LHC) has recently barred him from indulging in politics because he is the head of the state, his support to the armed forces, and that too at a time when their morale has touched the lowest ebb, is his constitutional responsibility.
Taking advantage of his position as a politician and also president of the country, he cleverly attempted to create a cleavage between the armed forces and the PML-N, throwing his weight behind the security institutions to isolate his rivals with a message to the “establishment” to determine who in this country – Asif Zardari or Nawaz Sharif – was a security threat. While the PML-N had already launched a campaign against Mr Zardari, the army and the ISI with Chaudhry Nisar and his retinue in the National Assembly sparing no opportunity to target them, Nawaz Sharif’s tirade against the president and the generals in his public meetings particularly after the May 2 US raid in Abbottabad seems to have prompted the supreme commander of the armed forces to seize the opportunity to reassure the khakis that he is the only political support to them in this difficult time when the options are already limited.
The way the PML-N has unleashed all its forces against the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and its leadership indicates that it has launched a campaign for the next general elections which may, as the observers see, possibly take place before the Senate elections next year in March. But the confrontation that has started between the two major parties also suggests that the country will again experience the politics of the 1990s, with the Charter of Democracy (CoD) and the PPP’s policy of reconciliation having lost their significance and relevance in the changing political environment.
The PPP’s alliance with the PML-Quaid will also work now. The budget has been passed and the next plan is “project Punjab”. This will, however, be possible if the members of the Unification Bloc return to the Q-League. As politics is the art of the possible and when a lethal combination of two “weathered” politicians – Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Asif Ali Zardari – will decide to go ahead for a showdown to control the largest province, there is a strong possibility that they would checkmate Shahbaz Sharif.
