What now?
Now that fissures in the Sharif family have spilled out into the open, Nawaz will have one more pressing issue to address when he comes home from London. In addition to the trial, and the constant attempt to start a fight between crucial institutions, he’ll also have to put out the fire in his own house, literally. The grapevine had been telling of just such friction for a while; but fresh news reports suggest that the cleavage might have become much wider than widely expected. It’s not just Nawaz and Shahbaz who are drifting apart. Their children too have become the centre, allegedly, of a dynastic feud that affects the very core of the ruling party.
While the Sharif family, naturally, denies any rifts, putting two and two together does make recent events a little more understandable. There was much behind Ch Nisar’s disquiet, for example, and it now seems more than a coincidence that he has been much closer to Shahbaz than Nawaz during this electoral cycle. And the Riaz Pirzada salvo was clearly not an isolated incident. Such thoughts are taken to press conferences only when pieces have been moved to new places.
Then there’s also the prospect of a good two-hundred-something ruling party legislators jumping ship just before next year’s election and contesting as independent candidates, as reported in this newspaper. If this news is true, and such tendencies do indeed snowball, PML-N could be staring irreparable damage in the face. If there is any truth to these stories – and they seem to carry considerable momentum considering the turn of events – Sharif family problems could well unwind PML-N itself as a political entity. A comfortable waltz through the next election, which seemed likely before the Panama scandal erupted, is already a distant memory. Now, it seems, things are fast coming to a stage where Nawaz might struggle with keeping both his trial and his party on the right track.
