Islamabad diary
The Panama leaks have driven the Sharifs into a world of their own…one in which they can hear only their own voices and those of close aides who excel in outdoing each other in flattery and telling their bosses what they want to hear. This is a sound-proof existence through which outside noises do not penetrate.
N M Uquaili, minister in Ayub Khan’s cabinet, was once accosted by demonstrators shouting, “chamcha, chamcha”. He asked the assistant commissioner with him what the noise was about. “A mere matter of cutlery, sir” said the smart young man. The sound of cutlery from the PM House is loud these days.
It is this distance from pressing reality which allows the Sharif coterie to think that they can still get away with the Panama revelations if only they stick to dodging the issue and serving lollipops to the opposition. They have got away with so much in their long political innings – the longest in Pakistan’s history – that they are hoping to get away with this too.
The Panama leaks, unfortunately, signal the arrival of something not so easily evaded – especially when the damning footprints can be seen, without the help of any telescope, from the top of a mountain. The Sharifovs, however, continue to live on hope and bluster.
They are also developing a taste for combat, taking on the combined opposition and in private, as reported in some newspapers, taking a sharp line against what we euphemistically call the ‘establishment’. Time was when a week wouldn’t go by without a picture on TV and the front pages of the army chief meeting the PM. Now a month has passed with this not happening, which is being taken as a sign of the rising strain between the two centres.
Nawaz Sharif was eased out of power in 1993 by Gen Waheed Kakar and deposed in 1999 by Gen Pervez Musharraf. There is no shortage of people who tend to think history is being tempted to repeat itself.
Nawaz Sharif is addressing defiant public meetings even as his world shrinks, effectively confined now to the Motorway Corridor, from PM House in Islamabad to fortified Jati Umra near Raiwind, its high walls guarded round the clock by over 2000 policemen. On the security and defence fronts the army is running the show – in Fata, Karachi, Balochistan and now even in Punjab. The Sharifs are presiding over an increasingly hollow dispensation.
Meanwhile, from Jati Umra comes word the Sharifs will take dictation from no one regarding the Panama leaks. In 1993 Nawaz Sharif dared the then President Ghulam Ishaq Khan by saying he would not take dictation from him. That turned him into a popular leader.
That was a different time and place. Nawaz Sharif standing up to an authoritarian figure was a popular stance to take, appealing to the public at large. This is completely different. It is about honesty and truthfulness. What appeared as defiance in the context of Ishaq Khan sounds very much like evasive bombast in the context of the Panama leaks.
The awkward questions raised by these leaks are about the Mayfair flats and the money trail leading up to them. Instead of answering these questions the PM is stepping into his inner world where the only sounds heard are those of flattery and empty defiance. No genuine discussion is possible in the inner sanctum of the Noon League. The culture permitting an open and honest discussion simply does not exist. How to brag, how to sound louder than the previous speaker, how to appeal to the vanity of the Quaid-e-Mohtram, the title by which he is known…this is the atmosphere prevailing there. Getting in a sensible word even sideways is next to impossible.
I’ve seen flattery in my time, including the PPP where the levels attained were quite exceptional. But nothing beats the N League.
Anyway, what is baffling is the mixing up of opposites. Be an international swindler and live the way you like. Swing as much as you want and live it up. No one will blame you. But why do you want to mix this with politics and leadership? If you do and you insist on keeping Mayfair flats even as you go emotional talking about the plight of the poor and the wretched, questions are bound to be asked…as they are being asked in case of the Sharifs.
The Mayfair flats go back a long way. Was it first The Independent or The Observer which reported about them, way back in the 1990s? The damning circumstances surrounding them are on public record. During Nawaz Sharif’s second prime ministership, the Sharifs took a loan of several million pounds from Al Tawfeek investment company, a sister concern of Al Baraka Bank – both from Saudi Arabia – for their Hudaibya Paper Mills, offering the Mayfair flats as collateral.
The Sharifs defaulted on this loan – no surprises there – and Al Baraka went to court in London for the recovery of the money. The interesting thing is – and this is on good authority – that on a visit to London Ishaq Dar wanted the bankers to come over and meet Nawaz Sharif to discuss the loan. The bankers said it was debtors who usually did the walking.
From the Mayfair flats to the bank branch in Upper Brook Street it is a five minutes’ walk. The PM and Dar drove to the bank and gave the usual spiel about having suffered political victimisation at the hands of the previous Benazir Bhutto government, none of which the bankers bought. They insisted on full payment. It was later after the Musharraf takeover that the loan was cleared through a payment made in Saudi Arabia – name of the benefactor, if there was one, unknown.
Given this history which is on public record, it takes a fair amount of audacity for Hussain – or was it Hasan? – to assert that the money for the flats came from the sale of their extraordinarily successful steel mill in Saudi Arabia.
Anyhow, the questions arising from the scandal engulfing the PM and his family require for their answer no advanced degree in mathematics. Where did the money for the flats come from? Were the flats declared in the income tax returns of the prime minister? That’s all…just the answers to these two questions. And the PM instead of coming out with the plain facts is addressing public meetings in Bannu and Mansehra and, what is more, equating those talking of Panama leaks with terrorists against whom the army has launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb.
To go by this logic, Gen Raheel Sharif should now announce Zarb-e-Azb Phase Two against the PM’s Panama leaks tormentors.
The budget session is not going to deliver the PM. Ramazan is not going to help. Spending the last week of Ramazan in the Holy Land is not going to make the questions go away. This is a real crisis the county is facing and far from trying to get out of the hole the Sharifs are in they seem to be digging deeper.
Email: bhagwal63gmail.com