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Thursday March 28, 2024

Realpolitik

By Hussain H Zaidi
April 01, 2019

They were at one in casting aspersions on the credibility of the July 2018 national elections. But they faced a split on the way forward: to become part of the parliamentary process or take to the streets. Their efforts to bring a joint candidate for the office of the prime minister, and later for that of the president, also came a cropper. Can the opposition parties now pull off a united stance against the government?

Politics is essentially a power game and political actions or policies are undertaken primarily with an eye to preserving or attaining power. Denuded of its moral garb, all politics in the end is realpolitik. So a political party will pursue the policies that it regards as most conducive to its interests. When Nawaz Sharif was disqualified by the apex court in July 2017, the PPP was among those which had praised the verdict to the skies. The party, which in the past had been a vehement critic of political ‘victimization’ in the name of accountability and judicial activism, shifted gears and cast itself as a champion of rule of law and cleaner politics. The change in stance was undergirded by the party’s desperate attempts to make itself palatable to powerful quarters.

Realpolitik doesn’t rule out cooperation among political actors. The literature on game theory, which supplies the intellectual basis of realpolitik, classifies political strategies into a zero-sum game and a non zero-sum game. In a zero-sum game, the gains secured by one player exactly match the losses suffered by the other. Thus the victory of one player is inexorably built on the defeat of the other. In such a scenario, a win-win situation is not possible. In a non zero-sum game, the players may cooperate to rack up their payoffs. Thus the victory of one doesn’t necessarily mean the defeat of others. Whether the parties play a zero-sum or a non-zero sum game is contingent upon the circumstances.

During the 1990s, the PPP and the PML-N remained embroiled in a zero-sum game. Given the two party system, whenever the government of one party was dismissed, the other party emerged as the principal beneficiary. The situation changed after the 1999 military coup, which forced the leadership of both the parties to go into exile. The 2006 Charter of Democracy signed by former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif was a manifestation of a non zero-sum game, as both leaders realized that cooperation, rather than collision, was in their mutual interests. The keynote of the charter was the commitment to launching a joint struggle against ‘military dictatorship’ – their common foe. After the 2008 elections, the PPP and the PML-N did rub shoulders in forcing Gen Pervez Musharraf to call it quits. Once the dictator was gone, the two parties reverted to a zero-sum game over such issues as reinstatement of the members of the superior judiciary sacked by Gen Musharraf.

During much of the 2013-18 period, the PPP played ball with the ruling PML-N for which it even earned the sobriquet ‘a friendly opposition.’ However, the PPP saw a good opportunity for itself in the fall of Nawaz Sharif, which accounts for its reaction to his disqualification, exit from the PM Office and first conviction by an accountability court. The party was also instrumental in the overnight change of the government in Balochistan and the PML-N’s defeat in the Senate chairman election.

After the 2018 elections the PML-N and the PPP insisted on joining the new parliament, whereas smaller parties – notably the JUI-F – wished to boycott it. The divergent stances were a function of the perceived stakes. The smaller parties didn’t have much stake in the post-election game of numbers. They won only a handful of seats, having been comprehensively beaten in their strongholds. On top of that, their top leadership couldn’t make it to parliament. At the other end of the scale, the larger parties didn’t see the boycott as an optimal strategy.

The PPP won more seats in the National Assembly in 2018 than it did in 2013. Its maximum expected payoff was to secure a majority in the Sindh Assembly; it hit the bull’s eye. The icing on the cake was that the party’s top leadership made it to the assemblies. The PPP might have seen eye to eye with the smaller parties had it been reduced to a minority party in the provincial assembly.

Then there was the possibility that in a hung parliament the PPP at some stage may get the opportunity to play the much cherished role of the balancer, at which Zardari is a dab hand. On a rather flimsy ground, the party backed out of its commitment to support the PML-N in the prime minister’s election and later fielded its own candidate in the presidential poll.

Since Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification, the PML-N had fallen between two approaches: whether to buck the system (the senior Sharif’s narrative) or to reaffirm allegiance to the higher powers in a bid to propitiate them (the junior Sharif’s narrative). With Shahbaz Sharif, who was also fending off corruption cases, in the van, it was a foregone conclusion that the PML-N wouldn’t try to rock the system. Choosing to go the whole hog over the allegations of ‘rigged’ elections would have constituted an affront to the powerful.

All those developments were taking place in the backdrop of a cat-and-mouse game, in which the PPP was fated to play an unenviable role. If corruption could prove the Achilles’ heel for the Sharifs, it may well put the Zardaris through the hoop. It was only a matter of time when the modus operandi that unseated the PML-N government would pull the rug from under the top PPP leadership as well. It is now widely believed that Zardari is likely to share the fate of his PML-N counterpart. The recent ‘show of strength’ by the PPP in Islamabad on the occasion of its top leadership’s appearance before the National Accountability Bureau followed by a train march, as well as Bilawal’s opprobrious remarks with regard to banned organizations, suggest that the party has read the writing on the wall and has decided to go on the offensive as the best form of defence.

Be that as it may, it is only by stretching credulity to the limit that we can assume that the PPP is capable of shaking the government’s hold. For one thing, the party – being a shadow of its past now – doesn’t have the popular strength to manipulate political developments. As the example of the PML-N suggests, even if the PPP had the matching strength, it would be exceedingly difficult for it to do so. That said, at least three courses are open to the PPP.

One, it can disrupt parliamentary proceedings but that’s not likely to put the ruling party in a spot. Two, it can play the familiar ethnic card. But the fact that the axe has already fallen on a top Punjabi leader for corruption has deflated the ethnic card. Three, the PPP can join hands with the PML-N and smaller parties – Maulana Fazalur Rehman would jump at the opportunity.

The question, however, is whether the PML-N will play along with the PPP. Shahbaz Sharif is slowly extricating himself from the clutches of NAB. His name has been removed from the Exit Control List. Nawaz Sharif has also been granted bail on medical grounds – albeit for only six weeks. All this prefigures that the PML-N would rather wait than take the government head-on as its optimal strategy. Thus it seems the PPP may have to face the music on its own, just as the PML-N has done.

The writer is an Islamabad-based columnist.

Email: hussainhzaidi@gmail.com

Twitter: @hussainhzaidi