Panama, what Panama?

Imran Khan has been threatening the march on to Raiwind for a while now, but is nowhere close to making it happen

Tahirul Qadri may huff and he may puff, Aitzaz Ahsan, Khursheed Shah, Shah Mehmood Qureshi may huff and they may puff, Imran Khan and his assorted minions may huff and they may puff, but it is increasingly becoming clear they cannot blow House Sharif away.

Like the past, Panama is another country — literally. The Terms of Reference, lovingly called the ToRs, are dead. The charade is nearly over.

Mr T Qadri stretched his vocal chords on Saturday night in Lahore — as he is wont to do, and threatened Sharifs with a most unappealing doom — as he is wont to do. Sheikh Rashid graced Mr T Qadri’s dharna stage with his considerable presence and promised an invasion of Raiwind — as he, too, is wont to do. The Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) show ominously warned of many great dharnas in the coming months — dharnas that the party and its leaders promise — yet again — will lead to an inglorious demise of the Sharif era.



Sounds annoyingly familiar?

So what now? Qadri is back in town with his trademark frown and is threatening to stay put. Imran Khan is dropping heavy hints of hitting the streets against the Sharifs after Eid, while Bilawal Bhutto is tweeting scorn on the First Family every chance he gets. Is then a combined storm brewing on the horizon and should the Sharifs be quaking in their boots?

Not really. Here’s the brutal truth: Mr T Qadri and his army of automatons just do not have what it takes to land a knockout punch. It doesn’t help also that Mr T Qadri’s credibility and credentials as a self-declared change-maker have taken some pretty serious hits ever since he first bunkered himself at Islamabad’s D Chowk. Fire and brimstone make for good prime time TV, but that’s pretty much all they are good for. The closest that Qadri’s automatons came to pulling down the ramparts of the government was to break the outer fence of parliament. In terms of symbolism, it really doesn’t add up to the revolutionary zeal of something like the storming of the Bastille.



If not the revolutionary change-maker that he aspires to be, can Qadri be nuisance enough when combined with other opposition players and their street muscle? To analyse this, let’s turn to the mercurial Khan and his band of merry men and women. Khan has been threatening the march on to Raiwind for a while now, but is nowhere close to making it happen. And even if he did make it happen, even if a couple of thousand people turned up near Raiwind for a dharna, will that bring down the Sharif government? Only a delusional person would actually take such a scenario seriously. The march to Raiwind is a non-starter.



Will Khan then build pressure on the Sharifs through massive rallies across the country? Will he prepare for an assault on the House Sharif by galvanising millions of his supporters across the length and breadth of Pakistan? Will he march on the capital and lay siege to the government thereby forcing Nawaz Sharif to step down?

Wait. Why does all this sound eerily familiar?

The brutal truth again is that Khan has been there, done that, with not much to show for it. No one has the stomach for a repeat performance, least of all his own party. A fresh round of jalsas and a fresh attempt at yet another dharna with the tacit help of the third umpire is a non-starter.

But what about the mounting anger against the Sharifs of the mighty PPP juggernaut? Well, sadly the PPP is neither mighty, nor a juggernaut — its young leader, a Twitter warrior who hurls his words at the Sharifs like paper missiles. The PPP roams the fertile plains of Punjab like a battered skeleton looking for a grave to bury itself without any rites. The way it is going, it may soon see its wish come true. It tries to breathe down fire on the Sharifs like Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, but all it ends up doing is coughing up a few sparks.

Huffing and puffing clearly does not blow the house away every time.

Here then is the good news for House Sharif: Panama Leaks will not be the fatal blow many wanted it to be. Here’s the bad news for the House Sharif: in some ways they are damaged goods.



The opposition is not oblivious to this situation. They may hold sombre meetings and issue dire warnings, but the likes of Khursheed Shah, Aitzaz Ahsan and Shah Mehmood Qureshi know very well the Sharifs are not about to be unseated. But the wily politicians they are, they also know the more they keep exerting pressure on the Sharifs, the more they will keep them on the defensive and the more they will soil their name and reputation among the electorate. They know Panama Leaks have damaged the Sharifs but will not destroy them. They also know that the maximum the opposition can do is inflict more damage and keep inflicting it for as long as they can.

Such a strategy — if one may call it that — may translate into rallies and dharnas and press conferences and parliamentary and judicial activity all aimed at one thing: make the Panama dirt stick on the Sharifs as the 2018 elections draw near.

Team Sharif will respond in kind. There shall then be a lot of noise after Eid, and perhaps some smoke too. But a decisive battle will have to wait till 2018, and that battle, hopefully, will be fought through the ballot box.

In the meantime, the unspoken brutal truth is evident: House Sharif is not in any existential danger. The prime minister will return after Eid and the business of the State will slowly return to normal. Noticeable, however, will be a certain intensity in political activity as well as a sense that the campaign for the next elections may already have started.

As this larger picture unfolds, Mr T Qadri may realise he’s less a player in this game, and more a pawn. And pawns are never change-makers.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 19^th, 2016.

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