Nawaz Sharif rode the crest of his new popularity right out of the country on Monday. A journalist working in Lahore called to tell me how absurd it was that the very man who stormed Pakistan’s supreme court in 1997 and had been an accomplice in threatening to kill an active chief justice of Pakistan (CJP) became a folk hero merely by following the judiciary’s cues to return to the country that unlawfully exiled him.
Seven thousand indisputably innocent supporters of the Pakistan Muslim League — Nawaz (PML-N) were arrested by police for waiting outside Islamabad airport to witness his arrival. Citizens in Pakistan have been calling Gen Musharraf “Busharraf” for years now, and now that Hariri and the Saudis have dabbled their hands in the mess, Sharif has become one of the country’s “good ol’ boys”.
Given Nawaz’s own pedigree in corruption, he was probably aware that the plane he was being escorted to by hulking commandos and Busharraf goons wasn’t headed for Karachi. It seems like one big fat publicity stunt. Another Pakistani reporter echoed these sentiments more poetically. He said that since Nawaz announced his return a week ago, Mush’s “arrow was already out of the bow”.
The PML-N admitted failing to mobilise in time, something I find hard to believe seeing that 7,000 of their own were arrested in the incident. The real blame lies in the way party lines were drawn up during the protests to reinstate the suspended CJP last spring, which have prevented these rival parties from participating in reinstating democratic rule together.
These enmities were first apparent to me outside the Lahore high court last April when women’s rights activists and students with Jimaati Islami pins chanted “Go Musharraf, go” together with striking lawyers, and jeepfulls of Pakistan People’s party (PPP) and PML-N supporters, dressed in uniform party colours, rolled in. Instead of waving flags with the unlawfully suspended CJP, they hoisted up posters of the same tired Bhuttos and Sharifs.
When I was marching alongside other college-aged protesters shouting an anti-Musharraf chant led by a youth with a megaphone, who was still wearing her school uniform, the other party slogans seemed played out. To the PPP and PML-N, the protests were only a recruiting ground. As rallies were organised by lawyers outside Lahore, the only non-lawyers being quoted in press coverage were party workers. Parties are much easier to co-opt into the existing cronyism than the public and, as a result, we have Musharraf meeting Benazir in Dubai and Nawaz sent packing back to Jeddah.
With no end to the current ban on student unions in Pakistani campuses, we aren’t likely to see a fresh set of leaders emerging from our youth. So we will continue to pay for free flights for the present generation of Bhuttos and Sharifs to vacation in West Asia.
Guardian