*Wonderful words from one of the world’s best journal , **Economist. **.hope to see Zardari and Altaf like players to follow the truth instead of lie and foul games
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IF PAKISTAN’S president, Asif Zardari, had ever wondered who rules the roost in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, he found out on Sunday March 15th. As an angry crowd gathered outside the house—and temporary prison—of Nawaz Sharif, Mr Zardari’s great rival, the provincial police melted away.
With a roar of sports utility vehicles, Mr Sharif, the “lion of Punjab”, then swept forth to lead a protest march to Islamabad. “This is a prelude to a revolution,” he declared. Faced, at least, with a continuation of political unrest that had included a small riot that day in Lahore, Punjab’s capital, Mr Zardari proceeded to bow to his rival’s main demands.
In a televised speech broadcast early on Monday—even as Mr Sharif and his exuberant followers were travelling in convoy to Islamabad—Mr Zardari’s prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, promised to reinstate Pakistan’s deposed chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, on March 21st. Mr Zardari’s erstwhile refusal to reinstate the sacked judge, whose cause Mr Sharif has been championing, was the main reason for the collapse of a power-sharing agreement between the two men last year. Mr Gilani, who heads a coalition led by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), to which he belongs and which Mr Zardari leads, has also promised to undo constitutional changes made by Pervez Musharraf, the country’s former leader.
In response to this climb-down, which Pakistan’s army and the envoys of America and Britain had been urging on Mr Zardari for several days, Mr Sharif declared that the protest rally, billed as a “long march” to Islamabad, was off. He then returned to his opulent hacienda outside Lahore, which contains two stuffed lions and much memorabilia from his two terms as prime minister during the 1990s. For Mr Zardari, who inherited the PPP from his murdered wife, Benazir Bhutto, this represents a serious embarrassment, for which he is mostly to blame.
The failure of the coalition agreement was perhaps inevitable. Mr Zardari feared that Mr Chaudhry, an unpredictable judge, would undo all Mr Musharraf’s edicts—including an amnesty that he had received from corruption charges. For his part, Mr Sharif, who manipulated the judiciary with abandon during his periods in office, plainly hoped that a gratefully restored Mr Chaudhry would overturn Mr Musharraf’s ban on third-term prime ministers. Many considered that this dispute between Mr Zardari and Mr Sharif encapsulated the natural rivalry between their two parties. But Mr Zardari, Pakistan’s most powerful civilian president, went too far.
At least partly at his behest, on February 25th the Supreme Court disqualified Mr Sharif and his brother, Shahbaz, Punjab’s chief minister, from holding public office. Mr Zardari then dismissed the province’s legislature and declared president’s rule in Punjab. Given that he—an ethnic Sindhi, like most of his coterie of advisers—is especially unpopular in Punjab, this was always likely to cause unrest. By throwing his weight behind the lawyers’ long-planned protest march on behalf of Mr Chaudhry, Mr Sharif was able to engineer a crisis.
Hitherto Mr Zardari may have trusted to support from America, Britain and Pakistan’s army, who are all, to varying degrees, wary of the populist and conservative Mr Sharif. He can no longer do so—the Punjab police’s decision to free Mr Sharif from confinement was very likely in response to an army command. Indeed, this may be a positive development in the effort to rebuild Pakistan’s much-abused democracy: given quite how unpopular Mr Zardari, the accidental president of a country he is alleged to have looted, has swiftly become.
Yet this latest pause in Pakistan’s political turmoil is likely to be brief. Reforming Pakistan’s constitution, in effect stripping Mr Zardari of many of the swollen presidential powers he inherited from Mr Musharraf, will be a messy business. More urgently, it is unclear what ruse Mr Zardari may now attempt to protect himself from the maverick Mr Chaudhry.
Outside the deposed chief judge’s house in Islamabad on Monday a crowd of his admirers had gathered to celebrate. While inside their hero slept, one waved a placard that read: “We fought for justice and survived”. Another, a bearded Islamist, expressed his hope that Mr Chaudhry would swiftly pass a death sentence on Mr Musharraf. And a supporter of Mr Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) party predicted that Shahbaz Sharif would be reinstated in Punjab within a week—and Mr Sharif would be Pakistan’s prime minister within a year.
Pakistan’s prime minister is forced to climb down | The lion unleashed | The Economist
