He Still Counts
NAWAZ SHARIF, 67
Three-time prime minister, he refuses to go quietly into the sunset despite his latest setback, which has sent him into political exile for a decade
If Pakistan’s political landscape were a nursery, it would look like this: a giant tree towering over a forest of potted bonsais. The tree being the Pakistan army, the country’s only stable institution, but one which has not allowed another to grow in its shade. The army sets the limits for political parties— they can have no say in security and foreign policy, especially ties with arch enemy India. Former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif was one who tried—unsuccessfully—to stand up to the military. It was especially ironic because Sharif was brought into politics in the early 1980s by a military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq. The scion of one of Pakistan’s richest families, from the country’s heartland Punjab, seemed the ideal foil to counter the rise of the charismatic Sindhi aristocrat, Benazir Bhutto.
Somewhere along the line, Sharif came into his own, but found the military and judiciary dogging his every step. Retribution was either direct—a coup by former dictator General Pervez Musharraf in 1999— or through the president during Sharif’s first term as PM in 1993. More recently, a judicial coup is being whispered as the reason behind the Supreme Court’s July 28 verdict over the Panama Papers case, dismissing him as PM and imposing a decade’s exile from any political office. The dismissal made Sharif one of the few global leaders to have had three truncated terms as PM. No Pakistani head of government has ever completed a full term, but while most have faded away, Sharif has proved to be remarkably resilient.
The military has now propped up Imran Khan as an alternative to Sharif in the 2018 general elections and Pakistan’s National Accountability Bureau is readying a fresh batch of cases against him. Yet, Sharif, as chief of Pakistan’s largest political party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, has resolved to fight on. In nominating brother and current Punjab chief minister Shehbaz Sharif as the PM candidate for 2018 and announcing his intent to take the judiciary on, Sharif has given ample evidence he won’t be riding into the sunset soon.