RETURN OF THE POWER PLAYER

WITH PAKISTAN'S ECONOMY IN TATTERS AND IMRAN KHAN IN PRISON, NAWAZ SHARIF IS BEING PRIMED FOR A DECISIVE ROLE IN THE COUNTRY'S POLITICS

- HASAN ZAIDI

As Nawaz Sharif made his way up the elevated stage at his party’s show of force at Lahore’s landmark Minare-Pakistan on October 21, his daughter Maryam Nawaz pointedly recited a verse from the Quran on the mic. The well-known Arabic verse translates as “Indeed, You [God] can exalt whom You please, and abase whom You please.” The fact that this was the same Quranic verse tweeted by the army’s spokesperson, then Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, on July 25, 2018, as election results poured in, was not lost on anyone. The results had suggested a final nail in the coffin for Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), and a win for Sharif’s rival, Imran Khan.

Sharif himself had already been ousted as a third-time prime minister and disqualified for life from holding public office by the Supreme Court in 2017 and was later jailed by a special court for 10 years for corruption. Sharif and his party squarely held the army leadership of the time and a compliant judiciary as biased and responsible for blatant political engineering and had claimed the judgments were given under duress. And yet, here he was nearly four years later at Minar-e-Pakistan, coming straight off a chartered flight from Dubai and Islamabad, waving to his rapturous supporters in a piece of political theatre designed to indicate that his political fortunes had once again been miraculously resurrected.