Backdoor channel: Zardari, Nawaz keep in touch through aides

PPP leadership believes and hopes that Sharif would take the lead to save democracy in case it was challenged.

ISLAMABAD: Despite growing bitterness between them, President Asif Ali Zardari and his political arch-rival Nawaz Sharif are maintaining a backdoor communication channel as part of their broader understanding to resist any “adventure” against democracy in the country.

Close associates of both leaders said they were in touch with each other through their point-men, a revelation that seems at odds with the public perception that the two are incommunicado.

Several leaders from the PPP and PML-N told The Express Tribune on Sunday that Zardari and Sharif had agreed in 2008 to not take their political differences to the level that some other “institution” could exploit the situation.

They had also set up a mechanism to keep communication between them alive and that was still intact.

“They are not rival armies… they are politicians opposed to each other and in politics the key is to keep on talking to each other.

Both are sensible enough to know this fact,” a PML-N leader told The Express Tribune requesting anonymity. Leaders from PPP also confirmed a communication channel between the two.

A spokesperson for Sharif, however, denied any backdoor communication either with Zardari or his party, saying it was against PML-N’s policy.

“We don’t believe in behind-the-curtains politics. Whatever we did in the past was in the daylight and we will do the same in the future… we have nothing to hide,” said Senator Pervaiz Rashid.

Asked whether there was any ‘broader understanding or a tacit agreement’ between Zardari and Sharif to fight back together in case of any threat to democracy, Rashid said everybody would resist “unconstitutional” steps by any institution.

(Read: ‘Zardari conspiring to create Nawaz-Army rift’)

Public reminder of a secret deal

But a PML-N insider said President Zardari actually reminded Sharif of his promise when he last week asked the opposition leader through a letter not to travel extra grounds in criticising the government.

(Read: Zardari to Nawaz - Stop criticising the army)

Zardari made a “not so clandestine” reference in the letter in an apparent attempt to make Sharif realise that democracy could be in danger if there was chaos on the streets due to fighting between their two major parties.

The president’s letter was leaked to the media a day after Sharif bluntly blamed Zardari for all the problems the country was facing at a gathering in Lahore.

Political observers said Sharif had apparently toned down his rhetoric against the president since then as the PML-N leader went on a trip to Sindh to visit flood survivors there.

A PPP spokesperson said the president has never blocked communication with any of the political leaders or groups but did not specifically mention whether Sharif was among them.

“What I can tell you is that we talk to Sharif’s party, its leaders at different levels… we maintain these contacts. They are unavoidable in politics,” said PPP Information Secretary Qamar Zaman Kaira.

He, however, denied a direct communication channel between the president and Sharif, saying there was no need for it.

About the understanding to save democracy, Kaira said the PPP leadership believed and hoped that Sharif would take the lead to save democracy in case it was challenged.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 12^th,  2011.