Nawaz Sharif On The Back Foot

Nawaz Sharif Has Plenty More to Worry About Than the Surgical Strikes: Panama Leaks, a Combative Imran Khan, the Next Army Chief...

- Wajahat S. Khan

They say (“they” being the die-hard, pro-Imran Khan lot, the mixed bag of drawing room-cum-mess hall soothsayers and other government-bashers) that Nawaz Sharif is going to go, one way or the other, by the end of the year. A few paths are being paved by the push-him-outers (despite the government, parliament, media and the military coming together—a rarity in multi-polar Pakistan— to reject India’s ‘surgical strike’claims) for the third-time prime minister to exit from stage left.

But this lot depends too much on the improbable, on creativity—popular but impractical tactics among the Pakistani anti-system pace attack. But there’s always a chance that some slippage—a case, a protest, violence—can give these notions some extra traction.

Consider this. In late October, the highest courts will hear disqualification appeals about Sharif’s Panama skeletons, at least the reported ones. Here, the PM’s allies are giving bring it-on signals. They know the courts, and expect the case to be heard, and trashed. But Pakistan’s courts are populist, and always have their antennae up for what’s hot. For many, it’s hot to be anti-Sharif right now.

Then, at the end of October or early November, Khan, rejuvenated from a recent rally near Sharif’s family estate in Raiwind, will march on Islamabad in a redux of his 2014 ‘dharna’—a 126day sit-in that resulted in diminished returns and a tarnished reputation for him: Khan’s own shotgun wedding after an affair with a journalist, a semi storming of parliament and the state television station, and a strange partnership with a mysterious sect leader, Tahir-ul-Qadri (and an even stranger one, allegedly with a couple of spy chiefs, in and out of service at the time).