Building strong bridges

A united effort needs to be forged to take the country forward without hindrance.

The elections are over, with their inevitable flurry of accusations, counter-accusations and the tensions these bring. It is time to build bridges — sturdy ones which can take us to a better future and help us overcome the multiple crises we are currently facing. In this context, we need maturity and statesmanship from our top leaders, and the demonstration of this at the presidency on May 22, where the man who will soon take oath as prime minister, Mian Nawaz Sharif, met President Asif Ali Zardari at the sidelines of a luncheon hosted for the visiting Chinese premier.

Both men agreed that cooperation was vital to the country’s future, with all forces required to work together to save it from its current set of problems. President Zardari assured Mr Sharif that he would receive full support from the presidency as he set about this task. In turn, the PML-N chief assured the president that he accepted him as a constitutionally-elected head of state, and would not be seeking his resignation. There was agreement, too, to work for the Charter of Democracy signed by Mr Sharif and the late Benazir Bhutto. Key PML-N leaders later joined the meeting and Mr Sharif was invited to join the president during his meeting with the Chinese premier.

The gestures we saw and the comfortable reconciliatory tone adopted by the leaders of both parties, which have over the past years not always been on good terms, is encouraging. Indeed, we cannot manage without a genuine willingness to move along together, given that the PPP remains the dominant force in the Senate, while the president will naturally also have some role to play in matters. The meeting on May 22 hopefully indicates that we may finally have moved beyond the acrimonious politics of the 1990s, which caused so much instability and turbulence in the country. We certainly hope that this is the case so that a united effort can be forged to take the country forward without hindrance or any clash between various players who hold power within it.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 24^th, 2013.