A time of instability

Will the PPP be able to keep its government afloat with IMF mandated taxation and ending of the subsidy on petrol.

Only the politicians are congratulating themselves, as the country lurches towards what may well become a terminal politico-economic phase. On February 18, while addressing his party echelons from the PML-N strongholds in Punjab, Nawaz Sharif announced that the PPP government had not implemented his 10-point agenda. Earlier, he had hinted at some kind of “million march” if the PPP did not implement it, at times sounding as if he will join the agitation already being choreographed by some smaller but more vociferous parties. Whatever he may do, some kind of fat is in the fire, and it might begin with the PPP getting kicked out from the Punjab coalition.

All this will be “in the national interest”, as Mr Sharif put it. The same day, however, the PPP pulled off an extraordinary change of hearts in Karachi. It patched up with the MQM and got its firebrand home minister, Zulfiqar Mirza, to accompany Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah and Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik to MQM headquarters, where the two parties acted as if they had never quarrelled with each other. Altaf Hussain, who had not long ago recommended a mixture of the French Revolution and a partial coup d’état, Pakistani style, against the PPP, went out of his way to pledge the MQM’s loyalty to the PPP-led coalition in Sindh.

After this bit of patching up with the MQM in Sindh, the Sindh home minister said that if any harm came to PPP offices in Punjab — a reference to what the Sharifs had indicated a couple of days ago — the PPP would respond in kind to PML-N offices in Sindh. Such bluster is hardly going to create an atmosphere of camaraderie between the two parties who are in a coalition in Punjab. The message was: The PPP will complete its three years in office and the guarantee of that was the party’s reconciliation with the MQM.

We don’t know how party chief Asif Ali Zardari managed this patch-up, but it must have required some deep massage of the ruffled ANP ego, which stands opposed to the MQM in Karachi’s lawless environment where ‘bipartisan’ target killing is the order of the day. There is no doubt that the reconciliation was ordered by the president. But it is also certain that Mr Hussain in London had got something that he wanted in Karachi, possibly a movement to his party’s liking in the local government in the city. Of course, all of this indicates that the president took seriously the threat that midterm elections could be held in another six months time.

The MQM must have been chastened by the maltreatment it had received at the hands of an ungrateful PML-N, after going along with it on the issue of the RGST and petrol prices to bring the PPP to its knees. Will the PPP now be able to keep its government afloat, with IMF-mandated taxation and ending of the subsidy on petrol? More and more state-owned institutions and corporations are bankrupt and there are departments where employees are not getting their salaries. If the PPP thought it could reach out to America for additional help by letting Raymond Davis go, that, too, has been thwarted by its allies.

The PPP is working on its other protean ally, the JUI-F, to finally put to rest the fear of being ousted from government through a no-confidence vote. All things considered, the price could well be very steep this time around, given the rhetoric of Maulana Fazlur Rehman about returning to the thorny embrace of Jamaat-e-Islami through a revival of the MMA. This is the most pristine state of terminal political instability in a country faced with terrorism — our own, through state-supported jihadis, as well as that inflicted by the Taliban and al Qaeda — and a rapidly dwindling writ of the state. The PML-N, which has shown signs of pragmatic behaviour in the past, is pushing the government against the wall, hoping that, after it falls, the PML-N will be able to use options it has prevented the PPP from taking. We can only hope that the current acrimony doesn’t lead to such an outcome.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 22^nd, 2011.