Oh please stay tuned this is just the tip of the iceberg there are volumes on ganja & ganja and of course abaji too…
http://www.subcontinent.com/sapra/world/w_1998_12_30.html
Nawaz Sharif Versus Nawaz Sharif
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has hardly anyone left in the ring to fight with. Like Joe Luis of old, he has knocked out every one - Benazir Bhutto twice, Presidents Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Farooq Leghari, Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah and now General Karamat. Within days of his taking over as PM almost two year ago, he had sacked the naval chief on charges of corruption. If this was the Vedic age, Nawaz Sharif could have held a horse sacrifice, ashwamedh, and then gone home to live happily ever after. Regrettably, this is the post-Ghauri missile age, the post-Pokhran and the post-Chagai Hills blast age. For Pakistan it is also the age of US sanctions.
Now much has to be said for Mian Nawaz Sharif. In the rough and tumble of the pakistani political area, victories do not drop from trees like ripe fruit. Even minor successes have to be measured in terms of sweat, tears and blood - not to say money - that is spent in each skirmish. Hence he has proved himself a street fighter par excellence.
No army chief has ever backed down before a political opponent in Pakistan. The only exception was the ouster of Gen. Gul Hasan, when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto almost had him abducted through the good offices of his crony Ghulam Mustapha Khar, the then Chief Minister of Punjab, who made a name for himself with his rather rough and ready methods. One has only to read his former wife, Tehmina Durrani’s book, to learn how he dealt with sundry opponents and sundry wives.
By comparison, Mian Nawaz Sharif’s was dignified performance, and Gen. Karamat, left like a gentleman over as innocuous and issue as the National Security Council of Pakistan where the service chiefs wanted to play a role. This is specially intriguing, when one remembers that Mr. Sharif’s political opponents had got together during the end of his previous term and almost accused him and his intelligence agencies of “murdering” the previous army chief, Gen. Asif Janjua who had actually died of a heart attack while exercising on a treadmill. In the national coincidence, heart attack becomes a cog in in a vast conspiratorial mill that keeps grinding out its theories finer and ever finer. So the heart attack, followed by a murder charge by the general’s widow, contributed to Mr. Sharif’s exit.
But then it is not just individuals that he has beaten. He took on the judiciary and through chicanery (pitting Punjabi judges against a Sindhi Chief Justice) he made a mockery of the Supreme Court. (The judges of the SC annulled the appointment of the CJ of their own court, an appointment that had taken place more than an year earlier.) And this time he outdid any strong arm methods by previous PM’s by sending his goons into the Supreme Court and wreaking havoc there.
He took on the law as well - did away with the contemptible 8th Amendment, making the President of Pakistan a figurehead, as it should be. He changed the contempt law to personally get off the hook. Now he is driving the Sharia law down the throat of an unwilling Senate. He has gone from district to district delivering public speeches, debunks the Senate as an un elected body. He does not realize that if all the legislators of Punjab gang up along with another 30 from the nominated ones, minorities and others, they could change the constitution for good. The Senate, where different provinces have an equal amount of representation, corrects the balance against the tremendous domination of Punjab in the Pakistani polity. According to latest reports, however, he wants to defer the trial in the Senate till the elections there in the end of March which will give him a clout in the upper house as well.
But it is Nawaz Sharif’s political instincts that one needs to analyse. Each time he is cornered, or he faces a big problem, his first instinct is to hit out, either physically (as in the storming of the supreme court) or by doing an injury to law and civil liberties. Immediately after the nuclear blasts in the Chagai Hills, he clamped emergency in the country and did away with fundamental rights. When confronted with the intractable Mohajir problem (bedevilled by the efforts of Pak intelligence services which tried to split the MQM and set up a pro-government ‘Haqiqi’ faction), he threw the Sindh government out, promulgated Governor’s rule and set up military courts. What kind of democratic culture is he trying to promote if each time he faces a problem he clamps emergencies and crushes individual rights or dismisses duly elected legislatures?
There was an unwritten convention in Pakistan, nurtured by Zia-ul-Haq, that Sindh should have a share in the top posts. That is how Junejo and later Jatoi (though in a caretaker capacity) became Prime Ministers. Sharif could have chosen a President from among any of the other provinces. Instead, he chose family friend and Punjabi, Rafiq Tarar, an obscurantist who is an embarrassment to Pakistan.
Mian Nawaz has alienated practically every province, apart from Punjab, and broken away from allies from Sindh and NWFP. In February, Wali Khan’s Awami National Party (ANP) ended its nine year old alliance with Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML) because he refused to change the name of NWFP to Pakhtoon Khawa. The Mohajirs have been driven to such paranoia that Altaf Hussain of the MQM thinks that Karachi will either be declared as Federal territory or made a part of Punjab!
Mr. Sharif has to realize that he does not need to reinforce his macho image with the Pakistani people. They have all seen him over the PTV before and after the nuclear blasts in Baluchistan. His enemies stand defeated. But he shouldn’t look narcissistically into a mirror. If he does, he will find his image donning gloves and going into a pugilist’s classic half-crouch against himself. Sharif’s only opponent is Mian Nawaz Sharif himself.