Dirty laundry
Best friends, they say, make the worst enemies. They are the ones, after all, who share all the dirty secrets. The shared past, born out of trust, then becomes the Achilles heel, and both then play with a double-edged sword. That is exactly what seems to have happened with Zulfiqar Mirza, former Sindh home minister, and Asif Zardari, PPP co chairman and former president. Mirza’s sudden bursts of anger have been a problem in the past – like when he fell out with then Interior Minister Rehman Malik – but all that was water under the bridge for quite a while now. Suddenly, now, he has broken out with the former boss and old friend.
And despite Zardari’s silence, which should be appreciated, the situation has consistently degenerated. Too many people are threatening to expose too many ‘dark secrets’ about present and former PPP big guns, it seems. And is it just coincidence that this should happen when the party is already down and out politically? Despite Zardari’s best efforts, the party could not be whipped back into shape after the ’13 beating. His own trips to Punjab proved just as fruitless, in the final analysis, as his attempts to catapult Bilawal to the top ahead of time. The latter, in fact, led to more breakdown within the party; implying a possible parting of ways between father and son.
How, then, in such circumstances, should the PPP move to diffuse the issue? And Zardari himself may have kept silent, which again has been a calculated and good step, but it’s not as if he did not green-light others to take jabs at Mirza. The more this confrontation is worsening, the more it gives the impression of two heavyweights facing each other and refusing to blink first, lest the de-escalation be taken as a sign of weakness. But, in truth, there’s only so many options for Zulfiqar Mirza from here. By storming the police station he crossed the fine line of the law, and the more prudently he comes to terms with it the better. And the party, being the government, needs to be seen playing the more proactive role in toning things down. Hopefully wiser counsel will prevail and no more dirty laundry will be washed in public.
