In opting for imprisonment over exile, Nawaz Sharif may have furthered the cause of democracy in Pakistan

By choosing imprisonment at home over exile in a foreign land, deposed Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif has won the second round in his protracted power tussle with the mighty judicio-military establishment. More importantly, he has also furthered the cause of democracy in Pakistan (even if unwittingly) by forcing the generals to bare their hands and take a series of steps that chips away at their moral authority and erodes their credibility as an institution before the public. The impact of this development might not be immediately apparent but inevitable over the course of time. Politics is the art of symbolism. Of getting the message across in a simple and effective manner. The ousted prime minister is an astute politician. The symbol of Sharif and his co-accused daughter bidding their family members and a comatose Kulsoom goodbye in London to return home and face immediate arrest and a lengthy prison sentence is an emotive and powerful political symbol. More so because the Sharifs had the option of staying back in the comforts of their luxurious apartments in a first-world economy. [caption id=“attachment_4736101” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif. AP[/caption] The act of returning, therefore, is a shrewd move with legal, moral and political ramifications. At one level, it enables Sharif to carry on with the legal battle. His submission paves the way for an appeal against the NAB court’s decision on higher judicial platforms. It also ensures Sharif’s moral victory in the eyes of his supporters. Staying back in exile would have meant acceptance of the verdict and a tacit admission of his guilt. That would have been the end of Sharif, the politician. Back home to be “willfully” imprisoned, however, ensures his reclamation of high moral ground and gives PML-N workers and supporters a tremendous psychological boost. Sharif would know that electorate in south Asia has high tolerance for corruption among its leaders. The culture of corruption is so rife in the realities of everyday life that even conviction does not mean loss of moral legitimacy. There are ample examples in India of politicians reclaiming popular mandate after serving a sentence. All it needs is for the concerned politician to spin the conviction and sentencing into a victimhood narrative. There is little danger, therefore, that the 10-year jail sentence will harm his political career as long as he manages to show that the charges against him are not credible enough.

This is why the eschewing of exile and embracing of prison sentence is important — it turns the verdict into vendetta and lends credence to his claim that he is being unjustly prosecuted.

But all these reasons put together fade in comparison to the political points that Sharif may have scored by taking the Etihad flight home. His journey became an act of “supreme sacrifice” and an “open defiance” of the all-powerful military that wanted nothing more than to keep him away while they go about doctoring the electoral pitch to install a candidate of their choice in Islamabad. There is no one better than Sharif — who had been there and done what his principal political rival Imran Khan is doing right now — to know how this script will unfold. His efficient rendering of the martyr’s role (sacrificing comforts, own family and defying the court’s verdict) for the “cause of democracy” rattled the military which had no equivalent political message to counter it. The military-led establishment had no choice but to bare its cards and double down on dissent, protests and the media with all the force at its command. While it succeeded in quashing rallies, imprisoning the protesters, suspending communicative networks and blanking the media through coercive and regulatory mechanism, these very acts brought the military’s ugly, tyrannical face out into the open and it could no longer claim plausible deniability of its actions. Lahore went into a lockdown as key roads leading to the airport were blocked by the caretaker government, mobile networks suspended, media warned not to telecast live footage, protesters arrested, flight carrying the Sharifs was delayed and the premier’s request on landing in Pakistan to see his mother turned down before he was whisked away to the jail. In political terms, Sharif had the military exactly where he wanted it — carrying out the role of an oppressor crushing a powerless but popular politician. The effect was evident. Talat Hussain, a journalist and a talk show host, told The New York Times that he was yet to witness in Lahore “such palpable anger against the establishment… People have come out in the thousands to endorse Nawaz Sharif… There is anger against suppression. Against manipulation. Against blackout,” he was quoted, as saying. The newspaper also quoted an Amnesty International official as saying: “It’s the sort of crude repression that recalls dark periods of Pakistani history under military rule.” “In the whole of Pakistan, is Nawaz Sharif the only corrupt man?” Asif Khan, an auditor, told Wall Street Journal. “It is wrong that they are acting against just one party.” Nawaz wasted no time in exploiting the opening. “What credibility will these elections have when the government is taking such a drastic action against our people and this crackdown is taking place all over the country?” he told Reuters at the airport in Abu Dhabi as he waited for a connecting flight to Lahore. What we saw unfold over the course of the last few days since Sharif’s conviction and sentencing is a macabre drama that exposed the military’s covert machinations and revealed its overt attempt to rig the elections in favour of the Khan’s PTI. Sharif’s manouvres have robbed the army some of its sheen but it would be misleading to lay the entire credit at his door. In reserving its role as the supreme authority and the custodian of real power, the army has been careful not to let democracy grow roots in Pakistan. The genesis of its animosity with Nawaz lies in the fact that in his third term as prime minister, Nawaz sought to expand the role of civilian administration in shaping the nation’s defence and foreign policy by abrogating power from the army. Retaining the authority in these domains is crucial to the army’s legitimacy because the “supreme authority” is the “savior” of Pakistan from the “threat of India”. Now, if Sharif was to show that the “external threat” which keeps the army in business is a mirage created to ensure the perpetuity of army’s interventionist role in Pakistani politics, it would ultimately result in disaster for the generals in Rawalpindi. Sharif, therefore, was their enemy number one. “From day one, Nawaz Sharif acted as a dictator,” complained retired Lt Gen Ghulam Mustafa to Diaa Hadid of NPR. “The generals advised him not to offer peace overtures to India in a way that does not suit [Pakistan’s] interests… He does not listen,” said the general. The story of Pakistan’s halting progress towards democracy lies in the fact that the army, for all its displeasure towards Sharif, did not dare to stage an outright coup, and instead proceeded to employ a staged approach to unseat the prime minister through a softer coup. The peaceful handover of civilian power from one administration in 2008 to the other in 2013 had created in the minds of people a greater expectation from the democratic process. Consequently, the military sought to co-opt the judiciary in ousting Nawaz, tried to decapitate the top leadership in PML-N which it saw as a chief threat to its hegemony and drive its lawmakers away through “ threats and pressures”, coerce and intimidate the media into silence and self-censorship and project Imran Khan as the head of new “ king’s party” that it wanted to install in Islamabad. These machinations largely succeeded in dealing with the PML-N threat and increasing the relevance of Imran’s PTI but, on the other hand, it was increasingly evident that “this entire attempt of the military to manufacture an election with its preferred results, speaks of the desperation in the ranks of the military, which realises that parts of the domains it controlled have slipped from its hands,” as S Akbar Zaidi of Columbia University writes in EPW.

What Nawaz has done through his act of defiance is give this nascent democratic movement a decisive push. He has become the symbol of resistance against the army’s oppression.

As Husain Haqqani, author and former Pakistan ambassador to the US writes in The Print, “Through its ham-fisted approach, the Pakistani establishment has made the public forget their complaints against Nawaz Sharif and his daughter, Maryam. Instead, the father and daughter will now be seen as symbols of defiance in an establishment that has consistently undermined Pakistan’s evolution as a democracy.” This could be Nawaz’s greatest contribution to the cause of Pakistan’s democracy. It is ironic that such a push towards army’s delegitimacy had to come from a politician who once occupied the space that Imran now frequents.