Punjab feels the heat…finally

Islamabad diary
Nothing like what has happened in Sindh against the PPP has started in Punjab...no NAB arrests, no midnight knocks, just a slight shift in the wind. But the lords of the heavy mandate are sweating, even though the music has barely begun.
Two press conferences on Nandipur in as many days by the self-styled Khadim-e-Aala Punjab – principal servant Punjab (more servants like him and masters would become a redundant category). All that came out of the histrionics was the impression that the principal servant was protesting too much.
These are the wages of hubris. He wasn’t content to be chief minister of Pakistan’s largest province. He wanted also to be energy czar, the man to fix Pakistan’s energy crisis. But with not much achieved on that front, accountability time has come sooner than anyone in the realm of the mandate could have expected.
Nandipur is a scandal of course. But it is also a joke, the prime minister inaugurating its opening in May last year when behind the façade it was no secret that the opening was a sham, the power plant simply not ready to go into production. But the prime minister was in a hurry. And his team wanted to score brownie points. So they went ahead with a sham opening. The plant shut down after a day, no joking…which must be a world record as far as sham openings are concerned.
The price went through the roof, which is an imperfect simile because it actually shot through the sky. The Zardari government – and no one could beat them at mathematics – pegged the price at around 35 billion rupees. Come the PML-N and its superior accountants jacked it up to around (my figures are rough) a modest 55 billion rupees. Now the figure being bandied about, although as you can expect the Nooras are going red in the face disputing it, is 84 billion rupees.
With the situation thus heating up and the PML-N realising that the accountability winds hitting Karachi and Sindh are turning in their direction, the prime minister says Nandipur should be audited…a concession which amounts to saying that the cancer should be treated with aspirin. If anything calls for the heavy artillery of NAB to move it is Nandipur.
NAB chairman, Qamar Zaman Chaudhry, has an enviable reputation. His entire bureaucratic career – and he has had a good innings – marks him out as a PML-N loyalist. He had to be summoned to GHQ to get cracking about NAB cases long pending. He may have to be summoned again to put some fresh life into him – or to give him a chaabi – regarding present and long-buried cases pertaining to his lifelong patrons in the PML-N.
The PPP at long last is breaking free of its self-imposed restraints and putting to one side the game of self-serving hypocrisy going by the name of ‘reconciliation’ – you don’t touch me and I don’t touch you. Both sides said this was for the sake of ‘continuity of democracy’. Wags said it was for the sake of loot and plunder.
That cosy arrangement lies shattered, not because of the political parties but because of the army-led operation in Karachi and its attendant drive on corruption. Feeling the heat and the pinch and thinking better of attacking the army, the PPP is training its guns on the PML-N – Bilawal’s rant in Lahore and the press conference in Karachi of the Sindh ministers Murad Ali Shah and Nisar Khuhro indicative of this new approach.
Murad Shah indeed, throwing all caution aside, launched a full-fledged attack on Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N government, accusing them of massive corruption in the Nandipur project and the solar park, another bit of comedy, in Bahawalpur. He vowed that if the central government’s discriminatory policies at the cost of Sindh did not end, Sindh would not allow the use of its gas to Punjab.
What can one say to this except… ‘bohut der kar dee mehrban aate aate’. So-called reconciliation and the perception that it was a ‘friendly opposition’ laid waste to the PPP in what, in times gone by, was its stronghold, Punjab. Late in the day, it is trying to recover that lost ground – much of it since captured by the nouveau PTI.
(About the PTI it has to be said, it has yet to get its act fully together. The Nandipur charge-sheet should have been read out by it. There are so many other things on which a stand needs to be taken: emerging issues of corruption and the senseless craze for so called mega-projects, to name but two items in a gathering list.)
The Khadim-e-Aala at his latest press conference said he could have his neck cut but he could not deceive the nation – given his flair for drama he pointed to his neck when he said this. He should take better care of his neck and not tempt the furies. He it was who during the PPP’s rule or misrule set up his camp office below the Minar-e-Pakistan to protest against loadshedding. There before the TV cameras he would be fanning himself with a ‘pankha’ – to all appearances a man dying with pain, dard, for the nation.
During the election campaign he vowed that the PML-N would end load-shedding in six months. As he would say this, in an excess of emotion he would hit out at the microphones on the podium in front of him.
That was then and it’s already two and a half years into their third mandate. The microphones were easier dealt with than loadshedding. When they came into office countless trips were made to Turkey and China, fuelling the expectation that mighty things were about to happen. The trips to Turkey have almost dried up. The Pak-China economic corridor is the new story but the army seems to have taken over that narrative too. Meanwhile the energy crisis remains the nightmare it was, even as corruption stories are becoming the staples of political conversation.
All these are outward signs of a transitional change in Pakistani politics. The PML-N was trained to fight the PPP. It knew its PPP and knew its Zardari. But that battlefield is no more, new realities having risen to the fore. Calling the shots is the army, but there’s something new in its approach too. Instead of a frontal assault on the bastions of power – the usual exercises at which the 111 Brigade excelled – it is taking recourse to the indirect approach, always the better part of strategy.
It is initiating policy and knocking civilian heads gently to make sure that that policy is implemented. The civilians now have a token status. The present triumph of democracy began with one Mamnoon Hussein. Now virtually the entire civilian line-up is being turned into a clone or a replica of the respected president.
To what are we headed? Where is this going to end? We don’t know. We don’t know how the national situation is likely to develop between now and next November. We don’t even know how it’s going to be over the next six months. But if anyone thinks that after doing so much and gaining the ground it has in the kingdom of public opinion – and making the political class sweat – the army will simply fold up its tents and sound the retreat…that perhaps is an overly idealistic assessment.
Legions on the march, and wreathed in laurels, are not given to a voluntary abdication of authority and legitimacy. And let’s not forget that the legions here, by dint of performance and the failure of the politicians, have acquired an aura of legitimacy, at least in the public eye. You can take a walk down any bazaar to test the validity of this opinion.
The one problem is that whereas the political terrain has changed and is undergoing further changes, the political map – another word for the outward forms of constitutionalism – remains the same. Will the two be brought in line, the one reflecting the other? In other words, will the army force changes on the political class? Is any thinking going on about some kind of a new political setup? These are the big questions awaiting an answer.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com