ECONOMIC PUSH MIGHT PULL PAK CLOSER TO INDIA

The Sharifs are back in play, but can the Pakistan Army hold the fractious nation together? First, it will have to keep its own rank and file united

- NEENA GOPAL

WITH a pliant new prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, finally ensconced in Prime Minister's House in Islamabad for a second term, can Pakistan's Army, the de facto rulers of this quasi-military ruled state, finally breathe? Unlikely. While Pakistan's economy is in a shambles, with unemployment and food prices skyrocketing, the Imran Khan genie―unmalleable, impervious to military pressure-is set to skew the Army's well-laid plans.

Railing relentlessly against the establishment, Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf is poised this Saturday to unleash countrywide street protests, which cannot but stoke the seething anger among the young over a "robbed" election and upend the marriage of convenience that undergirds this military-political hybrid regime.

Despite every effort at intimidating him into silence, it is the incarcerated Khan, the Army's former protégé, and whose voice in parliament is Omar Ayub Khan, grandson of Gen Ayub Khan, who can derail the deal that has placed yet another favourite in the hot seat. Little wonder that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who returned to a grand homecoming after a four-year self-imposed exile in London, has acquiesced to his younger brother taking office, rather than be seen as party to a sham election.

To analysts who have trashed Pakistan's military establishment for continuing to play by its own rule book, squashing dissent even on social media, it is not working alone. It is being quietly dictated to by a powerful triad of foreign powers that cannot allow an uncontrollable maverick to have the kind of free hand that he was mistakenly given in 2018. While Pakistan is no longer key to the US's Great Game against China that dubious privilege now rests with India-Washington cannot walk away from Islamabad either.