new, discredited-re-credited leaders. While the young Asif looks and sounds oh-so-sincere, the old Nawaz seems to be acting. While Asif may be one hell of an actor, his admirers-turned-haters-turned-admirers once again would have us believe that the leopard has actually changed its spots. Either way, we will know soon: results speak louder than rhetoric and will be the final arbiter. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. All we have right now are promises and illusions. As for Nawaz, he is so single-mindedly consumed by the desire for revenge against Musharraf that he cannot see the wood of trees. He is a driven man. Hatred is an emotion that negates even the pretence of sincerity. It is a cancer that eats away at the vitals of rationality. Why can't Nawaz accept the fact that it was his hijacking of Musharraf's plane and asking the pilot to take it to India that caused the suicide of his government? It was Musharraf who agreed to let him go to Saudi Arabia and who agreed to his return. He need not have, and there is nothing anyone could have done about it. “Nothing is permanent,” Musharraf has said many times. So when he is no longer there, will Nawaz's old hatred for Zardari, whose wife made (fabricated?) so many cases against him and imprisoned his father, resurface? And will Zardari's resentment against Nawaz, who made (fabricated?) all those cases against him and his wife, and caused her to flee into exile and imprisoned him for seven years, return? (Fabricating cases, by the way, is in itself a huge crime.) If the presence of one man is all that binds this new Bhurban Alliance, one cannot hold out much hope for a tasty pudding. Despite inordinate US pressure to prevent a Zardari-Nawaz coalition, this is precisely what they agreed to in a woolly declaration last Sunday. On the face of it, it may seem that Zardari won and Nawaz lost, because he climbed down from all three demands on which he seemed intransigent - his ministers not taking oath from President Musharraf, impeaching him and restoring the sacked judges. The document makes no mention of the president or impeachment, Nawaz's ministers will take oath before Musharraf, and the National Assembly will pass only a resolution within 30 days asking for the judges to be restored. A resolution is not exactly a law. It is only the expression of a desire, a suggestion, especially on financial matters. It is not binding to the government. Read Chapter XV (Rules 157-169) in the Rules of Procedure of the National Assembly and Chapter IV on resolutions and their scope in the National Assembly Procedural Manual. You will find that, for example, the Assembly can pass a resolution condemning Denmark for the republishing of the blasphemous cartoons and ask the government to break diplomatic relations with Denmark, but that doesn't mean that it has to, or will, do so. The government is only bound to implement an Act of parliament. First, a bill has to be presented before the National Assembly, which will have to debate and pass it, then the Senate has to pass it, and only then does it become an Act (or law,) and only then is the government bound to implement it. The new government doesn't have the numbers in the Senate to have anything that requires a two-thirds majority passed. So if the National Assembly passes a resolution asking for the restoration of the sacked judges, the new Zardari-led government, in which Nawaz will be a partner, has to do nothing, because it amounts to nothing. Which is what made it easy for Zardari to accept Nawaz in a coalition. But what made it easy for Nawaz to come down? “The larger national interest?” Come off it! It is to force another elections because he is convinced that this time around, he will win a majority on his own. How does he do it? Enter the coming resolution, a part-witting, part-unwitting media, the sacked chief justice, his more-heroic-than-Galahad lawyers, the Twelfth Man and the chattering classes. This seemingly ‘out of the blue' turnaround when conventional wisdom had it that a Zardari-Q League coalition was on the cards may not be a turnaround at all but successful subterfuge. It reminds me of the nine-party Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) that was ‘suddenly' formed to oppose Z. A. Bhutto in the 1977 elections. For months prior to the announcement of the elections, opposition leaders had been writing rude and quarrelsome letters to one another stating many imaginary differences that were decoys, knowing that they would be intercepted by intelligence agencies whose ‘brilliant analysts' (who have single-mindedly misled every ruler) will tell Bhutto to hold elections immediately because the opposition is woefully divided. Bhutto, alienated by then as all leaders who give up on the people become or were never rooted in them in the first place, did just that. The PNA was born the next day, seemingly out of the blue, but it had a long gestation period during which its ‘mother' skilfully hid her pregnancy. The letters were all decoys, their public disagreements all subterfuge. Bhutto fell for it hook, line and sinker. The rest is history. Even though the elections were heavily rigged, the general perception after all these years is that Bhutto would have won anyway. ‘Suddenly' the PNA also found loads of money, took to the streets and brought the country to a standstill for five months. They would agree to none of Bhutto's suggestions because they wanted nothing less than Bhutto's head. They eventually got it after deliberately unleashing the army on us again because only the army could deliver Bhutto's head, which it willingly did in revenge for the 1971 defeat and the division of Jinnah's Pakistan into Bhutto's Pakistan and Yahya's Bangladesh. Most people don't know that Nawaz is fascinated by Bhutto, as he should be. History therefore demands that one should not rule out the possibility that Zardari and Nawaz decided on an alliance soon after the elections, created the illusion of stumbling blocks, dead ends and disagreements that really were decoys, and then ‘out of the blue' came up with the Bhurban Declaration. America and Musharraf fell for it hook, line and sinker. How does Nawaz become the winner in all this? It seems that for him the Bhurban Declaration is only a tactical step. In his larger strategic plan Zardari too will be wasted. How? Most people don't know the difference between a resolution and an Act of parliament. When the resolution calling for the judges' restoration is passed, the media will first lay the ground by dinning it into people's heads that it is now incumbent upon the new government to restore the judges. When they are not restored, as they know they won't, it will raise such a hue and cry that you will think that doomsday has come. Nawaz and the lawyers (with Imran Khan tagging along as Twelfth Man not knowing whether the game is cricket or Russian roulette) will take to the streets, put the sacked chief justice on Imran's shoulders (only he is strong enough), take him to the Supreme Court and plonk him in his old chair. This will be Nawaz's second storming of the Supreme Court - the first was to remove a chief justice, the second will be to restore one. There is nothing in the world more interesting (and sordid) than Pakistani politics. What then? Will Zardari baton-charge, tear gas and fire on his own people, on people of his own government? The real chief justice will ask the government and the army for protection, which will bring the new army chief right back into the political equation, whether he likes it or not. Remember how former Army Chief General Jahangir Karamat refused to provide protection to a beleaguered Supreme Court with disastrous consequences? How can you run a government when your own partners are attacking it? It is being touted by anti-Musharraf propagandists that he is ready to give up his power to dissolve the National Assembly and send the government packing under Article 58-2 B of the constitution if his opponents give up their insistence on restoreing the sacked chief justice. What is the compulsion? To satisfy the bloodlust of the kala-angrez, the Brown Briton who benefited hugely from Musharraf's rule while the going was good and now looks to benefit even more hugely (perhaps illegally) under the new Zardari-Sharif Combine that emerged from the merger of the Bhutto-Zardari and Sharif-Sharif combines - poor Bonny killed (God bless her soul), Clyde and Butch gang up while poor Sundance is looking for his gun. (Hopefully, they have finally decided to ‘go straight'). Why would Musharraf need any such ‘deal' when his opponents cannot even muster the numbers in parliament to impeach him or cause the restoration of the judges? Butch's real strategy is to get Clyde by derailing his government and forcing another election which he thinks he will win outright this time round and then do his will. No, no one is thinking of Pakistan. Forgotten is what the great Pathan Sufi-poet Rahman Baba said: “Always plant flowers to bloom in your country Don't plant thorns lest they pierce your feet.” “Is that a light that I see before me?” asked an innocent Pakistani in his convent school English, hoping that finally the promised dawn had come. “No, it's a train rushing headlong towards you from the end of the tunnel,” replied the wise and the wizened. __
