The brothers Sharif

A caged ‘sher’ tries to keep busy

At the end of 2014’s bizarre dharna — suspected to be facilitated by the usual suspects – Reuters quoted a Sharif aide as saying that the prime minister had been reduced from “czar-like prime minister to a deputy commissioner-like figure”.

The message from the deep state was clear: keep at your hobbies, like building roads and power plants, but the bigger picture stuff is all ours. We decide what to do with Afghanistan and India; we decide how much money we get in the budget; we set the parametres of exactly how to fight the war on terror.

And, oh, keep your hands off the old boys’ club. (An aside: former Army Chief Pervez Musharraf was at the premiere of Ho Mann Jahan in Karachi recently. He told reporters that he liked it.)

So Sharif tried to colour within the lines the best he could. It is depressing that in our polity, an elected prime minister ceding space to non-representative forces is seen as a sign of “maturity”. Well, by these macabre standards, the prime minister seemed to have matured.

Over the course of 2015, he indulged in his long-standing fetish for roads, like the motorway to Karachi and the Havelian expressway.

And then, there is the mammoth China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The PPP tried to take some credit while the incumbents differed to say that the credit was all theirs. The truth of the matter: the raging bull that is the Chinese economy wants easy access to some ports as well as some economic lebensraum. They would have been interested in the CPEC regardless of who was in power.

In any case, it fell into the League’s lap, just the way falling international oil prices did. The CPEC prospect immediately excited many. Could we ride the coat-tails of the Chinese economy to higher growth rates of our own? For a brief bit, even Sharif’s detractors paused to praise him.

The prime minister’s younger brother, now not content with just running the Punjab, seems to want to spread his wings of late. The top slot obviously being unavailable, he has taken a liking to the power sector; he functionally shares the portfolio with the power minister.

And that is not to mention his metro bus schemes. The year saw the Islamabad-Rawalpindi metro bus project, far sleeker than its elder Lahori cousin.

The PPP’s case might be different, but the problem with the PTI is that its ideals of development are identical to those of the League; the latter is only able to act out on them. For all its public criticism of the entire idea behind jangla buses, the PTI government tried building one of its own in Peshawar, but the security establishment shot it down because the proposed route passed through some sensitive areas. Perhaps a chief minister more energetic and proactive than Pervez Khattak would still have found a way around the problem.

All this has served to ensure that even the main opposition begrudgingly believes that Shehbaz Sharif is a man who can walk the talk. Lahore’s Orange Line is going to reinforce that image. As some within the PTI’s supporters are telling their party: fool-hardy, impulsive, ooh-shiny mega-projects are still better than no projects.

And if the ’17 deadline of meeting the power shortage is actually met, we know who is coming back to power in ’18, despite the incumbency factor.

*****

The League’s problem is that it is a party of the trading classes. And though this class is nationalist-conservative by nature, of late they have started seeing the utility of peace and friendship with India. It’s just good business.

That will not go down well with the powers that be. One doesn’t know how the government will react if there is another event like 26/11 in the coming year or two.

And if things in Karachi actually do lead to an open confrontation between the Sindh government and the military-run Rangers, it remains to be seen whether the League will return the support the PPP gave it during the dharna.