A decisive denouement?

MR. NAWAZ SHARIF, the deposed Prime Minister of Pakistan, has gone into exile in Saudi Arabia in circumstances that have not yet been fully explained. However, his dramatic exit from the `political' scene in Pakistan appears to bear the hallmark of an affirmative denouement in the tortuous drama that began with his overthrow in a bloodless military coup in October 1999. The virtual reality in Pakistan at this stage is an acknowledgment by its premier civilian leaders, by design or default, that their country's Chief Executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is not only the de facto ruler but also a de jure arbiter of its political life. Mr. Sharif has now either accepted a perceived Hobson's choice or actually cut a deal with the military regime to go into an apparent non-political exile. Pakistan's other well-known former Prime Minister, Ms. Benazir Bhutto, remains in voluntary exile in the U.K. by adopting a patently calculated policy of not wishing to challenge Gen. Musharraf on their home terrain. Independently of her, the `Mohajir' leader, Mr. Altaf Hussain, who has for long made a virtue of a self-ordained exile, keeps an arguably safe distance from Pakistan's Chief Executive. While the uncoordinated actions of these civilian leaders may not legitimise a military coup, they certainly have left Gen. Musharraf with the political space he needed to `govern' Pakistan. His credentials to speak for Pakistan on the international scene may have also received a boost as a result. This is a factor that India cannot ignore.

Mr. Sharif's wife has of course asserted that her incarcerated husband and some of his relatives, including her, have been unilaterally banished by Gen. Musharraf. The obvious suggestion is that he is trying to prevent the possibility of Mr. Sharif bringing a nemesis upon the military regime in Islamabad. Now, given the political style of Saudi Arabia and its fraternal and patron-like ties with Pakistan within the latter's ambit as an Islamic state, Mr. Sharif's own version from his new home in exile may be hard to come by. Dominant in the public discourse at the moment is the version by the Musharraf administration that Mr. Sharif has indeed been pardoned by the country's President before being sent into exile and that these actions have been taken on two counts. Cited are the putative mercy pleas by and on behalf of Mr. Sharif and, separately, Saudi Arabia's political willingness on humanitarian considerations to host him as an exile requiring medical treatment. An alternative account by Mr. Sharif's wife is that neither a petition for presidential clemency nor a move for plea bargain had been made by the former Prime Minister, who was duly re-elected to that position in 1997. So, some external advocates of a restoration of democracy in Pakistan can doubtless view the stratagem of clemency as a political death warrant to snuff out the reasonably young Mr. Sharif's dreams of re-emerging as a leader of his people.

Inside Pakistan itself, the investigations, judicial trials and the punishments concerning Mr. Sharif since his fall from power have not so far galvanised a spirited opposition to Gen. Musharraf. In a sense, however, the latest order exiling Mr. Sharif can be seen to have been timed to set the cat among the pigeons even as a fledgling alliance for the revival of democracy is still struggling to take off. Both Mr. Sharif and Ms. Bhutto are widely believed to have either blessed or acquiesced in the emergence of the alliance. Yet Mr. Sharif's exile as a sequel to Gen. Musharraf's coup leaves the latter almost exclusively in charge of Pakistan, whatever might be the military ruler's economic and other challenges on the domestic front. Any persistent refusal by New Delhi to engage Gen. Musharraf's Pakistan in bilateral parleys in this changing context will be no less vacuous as before.

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