From Nawaz Sharif to Musharraf: Why Pakistan's politics plays out in London

by Sanjay Suri

London: Reading the news on Pakistan from London now is as it should always have been. For too long the politics of Pakistan, and up until about a year ago, was being played out by its leaders sitting in London. This displaced, and misplaced, Pakistani politics had long been waiting for that one-way flight back.

The most recent passenger on that flight path, General Musharraf, does not look like he’s heading back to London for a long time yet, for even a visit. It must be a comfortable home near Islamabad where the general must now feel very uncomfortable seeing his old enemy Nawaz Sharif take over as Prime Minister. Not a home from which the prisoner general will step freely out for a while with the courts against him, and the army itself not much on his side. Seemingly that is, and for now.

London had been comfortable for the general on all fronts. He was at home in his sumptuous flat a stone’s throw from Hyde Park, and the British government had done more than its bit to look after the general at home and outside. Until bin Laden was killed that is, and the British and the Americans figured the wily general had most likely been stringing them along. The British pulled back security and hospitality, and that did its bit to encourage the miffed general to return.

The general and Sharif had little in common other than some troubled dealings in Islamabad, and residence in London at different times later. Nawaz Sharif has a flat in the Musharraf neighbourhood in London, just behind Park Lane along Hyde Park, no more than quick walking distance from Musharraf’s home. As with many Pakistani leaders, self-exile shaded into exile.

Sharif was in London in his half-exile after leaving Saudi Arabia where Musharraf had dispatched him after staging his coup in 1999. Sharif had been in waiting mode in London before his return to Pakistan. When he did go back for the 2008 elections, he was promptly dispatched to Saudi Arabia, but then returned, with London, unusually, not en route.

Musharraf followed much later. Now one is Prime Minister, the other prisoner fearing what the new PM gleefully might do – or not stop the courts from doing. One way or another, when it doesn’t work out in Pakistan, its leaders come to London. Musharraf came when his days as dictator were over, on some hope he would be a critical ally to the West in its ‘war on terror’. He swapped places with Sharif in a sense between Islamabad and London, until his return to Islamabad in the delusion that people in Pakistan were waiting for him.

Among the several one-way flights that have taken leaders back to Pakistan from London, or from London originally and then from Dubai, Musharraf’s flight was possibly the most foolish. For years Musharraf had no political life outside of the media, and now that too seems on the wane.

Just a street away from Musharraf’s flat, at the Hyde Park end of Edgware Road is the flat of Rehman Malik, interior minister under the Zardari government, and which was Benazir Bhutto’s political headquarters in her years in London when she, along with Nawaz Sharif, were here courtesy of Musharraf. The political outlook of Pakistan’s leaders differed as they differed in the direction they faced Hyde Park.

Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were in London through years when they believed they could not safely return to a Pakistan under Musharraf. The fears of Benazir, and the fears many had for her, proved tragically right when she returned to contest the 2008 elections and she was assassinated. The sympathy kind of vote so popular in the subcontinent brought Benazir’s husband Asif Ali Zardari into government – but with his son and the intended leader-in-waiting Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in Oxford being groomed to take over the party. Under his chairmanship today, the Pakistan People’s Party stands rubbished at the polls.

Bilawal returned to Pakistan from Britain in 2011. His security in Pakistan has cost likely a great deal more than the million pounds a year spent protecting him while in Britain. He made his first public speech in Pakistan in December last year. That didn’t take him far. But at the least he played chair of the Pakistani party within Pakistan now, and not from Oxford, or from London where he spent much of his time as chairman of the party.

This leaves the MQM leader Altaf Hussain still in London. Now with Nawaz Sharif at the helm in Pakistan, it seems fairly certain that the last one-way flight that would take this remaining leader back to Pakistan from London will never take off. Given the uncertainties in Pakistan despite the very promising election process this time, who could be just as confident that the last flight that brings a Pakistani leader to London for more than a visit will never take off either.