Shahbaz Sharif — victim of a successful policy

Has he bitten off more than he can chew?

“Build something nice,” is the advice that the newly elected mayor gets from the experts in the critically acclaimed show The Wire when they tell him how he can win the next election. A downtown building project, “something tangible” that the new mayor can put his name to. Oh, and bring the crime rate down, and “keep [your] boyish good looks”. Also, stay away from education. “Education is a loser.”

As a newly elected chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif followed the advice meant for Tommy Carcetti to a T from 2008 to 2013. He built the Metro Bus project and whether someone liked it or not, they couldn’t deny that it was there. He had done something tangible. Even his worst detractors would not be able to dismiss him and his achievement completely. The PPP government in the centre took most of the blame for failing to stop the terror attacks, so Shahbaz Sharif was covered on that score. Whether he kept his good looks, I’ll leave to the experts, but he trounced his opponents in the election, so he probably didn’t do too badly in that department.

The success of the strategy meant one thing. Sharif had stumbled upon a formula for success. All he had to do to win the next election was to build another project and put his name on it. Terror attack numbers came down thanks to Operation Zarb-e-Azb or whatever and he had the cherry of the weekly new power projects to put on top of the meticulously prepared sundae he planned to offer to his voters. How could it go wrong? Well, here’s how:

Orange Line Metro Train, his chosen baby, first and foremost, showed the lack of imagination of the government. Another transport project, seriously? In Lahore? The Metro Bus was the first mass transit system for the modern era. The metro train project was the first “why are you bothering me with your digging up of roads and who travels on trains anyway? Misfits and weirdos, that’s who.”

I’m far from a Sharif hater but when I first heard of the project, I thought, well, he’s going to use the project as bait to get votes in the next elections. Talk the project up as much as possible, but never actually build it. That’s genius. Shrewd and Machiavellian, but also genius. I did not for a second think that Sharif would be less clever than that.

And then he made the worst mistake possible. He let the opposition create the narrative that would eventually come to surround the project.

The opposition for its part didn’t waste the too-expensive-maybe-involves-skimming-off-the-top cache that they had generated from the Lahore and Rawalpindi Metro Bus projects and successfully mixed it with “useless project” and “destroys heritage”. People getting uprooted from their homes and their places of business, the compensation for land maybe inadequate — the opposition’s smear campaign was a resounding success.

Maybe it was arrogance. “People hated Metro Bus when we started building it,” Shahbaz Sharif is fond of saying. Let’s build the project and perceptions will catch up, was their idea of a winning strategy.

But the project started getting built and there was no turnaround in the way people saw it. Punjab government kept ceding ground and things went from worse to “Oh my God, you’re killing us.”

To lose this much political capital on a project that is seemingly meant for public welfare should not be possible, and yet the opposition to the project kept getting stiffer even as the government kept up with the grind. It was as if the government thought that once the project was complete, they would be able to wipe the grins off the faces of the opposition, so what did it really matter?

But it did matter. Sharif and Co realised that they could not afford to keep taking it on the chin and had to respond. Khawaja Ahmed Hassan, Lahore’s former mayor, was given the task of setting the record straight. He talked at length about the need for the programme as he tried to counter opposition’s talking points one by one.

The price tag was actually low, he said. They had been quoted the history’s lowest price, and then they negotiated it down even further. There is not only going to be adequate compensation, there’s almost going to be too much compensation. And it’s going to be efficient. One day solutions, baby, one day solutions. And don’t even mention heritage sites. We’re not only not going to destroy them, we’re going to rebuild them too. Yeah, we’ve kept money for that in the project. You know what’s better than an extremely old heritage site? A new heritage site, baby, a new one.

Sharif himself appeared in a couple of talk shows to repeat the talking points. He largely kept to the script but was barely able to hide the fact that he thought he was untouchable on the heritage sites issue. He kept responding to the question of why he was ruining Lahore’s cultural heritage by saying that the matter was before the court. Of course, he knew that the court has ruled several times in government’s favour when it has been moved for a stay order against the government on the pretext of possible harm to heritage sites.

Sharifs probably think they are going to have the last laugh. But at the moment it appears that the opposition has effectively and comprehensively poisoned the pot. As soon as there are actual ‘victims’ involved of a project or a scheme, it becomes extremely difficult to change people’s perceptions regarding that scheme. Even if someone really likes the project, they are going to hedge their enthusiasm due to the victims’ suffering. Only monsters admire silver linings in the presence of actual, tangible victims.

Even if perceptions change after 15 or 20 years, and they probably will — after all, suffering subsides but hardware remains — and we are, at any point, one incompetent government away from people remembering that maybe Sharifs weren’t so bad after all. If someone’s worst quality is their overfondness for building things, how bad can they really be? But I’m guessing Sharifs are not building the Metro Train Project to win the 2028 elections. If something does not change, and very soon, Sharifs will have to contest the 2018 election against Bilawal and Imran Khan on their good looks alone. God help them!