BackNawaz Sharif: A helpless Prime Minister, by his own admission
The Pakistan prime minister, in a secret meeting with Modi at the Saarc summit, admitted his 'negotiating power with the army had been gradually whittled away'
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In her debut book, journalist Barkha Dutt tells us that Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif, the respective prime ministers of India and Pakistan, held an hour-long secret meeting during the 18th SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) summit held in November last year at Kathmandu. The story scooped by Hindustan Times from Dutt’s book, This Unquiet Land—Stories from India’s Fault Lines, reveals that the two prime ministers allegedly used the mediation service of Sajjan Jindal, an Indian steel magnate.
During this meeting, Modi is said to have hinted at the upcoming Jammu and Kashmir elections to convey his inability to reopen formal channels of bilateral talks. Sharif narrated how his “negotiating power with the army had been gradually whittled away". Prashant Jha of the Hindustan Times, who brought the story to light, says: “Her [Dutt’s] account reinforces a well-known fact—domestic politics often determines the course of the fragile bilateral relationship." This portrayal misses out the crucial qualitative difference between the domestic obstacles countenanced by the two leaders. While Modi’s obstacles were temporary and self-imposed in nature, Sharif has been hamstrung by the perennially powerful force of the Pakistan’s army which does not operate according to his wishes.
If Dutt’s revelations are indeed true, Sharif admitted his weakness before a foreign leader, and one who is often painted as hostile to interests of Pakistan. If anything, Dutt’s book may end up further depleting Sharif’s negotiating position within Pakistan. This is not the first occasion when a civilian leader in Pakistan has been accused of opening up the domestic divide before a foreign leadership. A far more interesting episode occurred during the tenure of Asif Ali Zardari as the President of Pakistan. Pakistan’s army was then headed by General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
On that occasion too, a businessman was chosen as the go-between. Mansoor Izaz, a Pakistani-American businessman, was—according to Izaz’s own story—the conduit for a memo authored by Hussain Haqqani, the then ambassador of Pakistan to the US, at the behest of Zardari. Addressed to Admiral Michael Mullen, the then US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the content of the memo was pretty explosive in nature. Delivered nine days after the US raid which killed Osama bin Laden, the memo expressed apprehensions about Pakistan’s army forcing the civilians out of power. The memo, accessed by Foreign Policy magazine, also urged Washington to use its influence to revamp the civilian government “in a wholesale manner" that “replaces the national security adviser and other national security officials with trusted advisers that include ex-military and civilian leaders favourably viewed by Washington, each of whom have long and historical ties to the US military, political and intelligence communities".
Unsurprisingly, both Haqqani and Zardari distanced themselves from the “memogate" scandal, as it came to be known. Another version of the story implicates Pakistan’s rogue intelligence agency ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) of fabricating the memo to create the grounds for the army to enforce dominance over the civilian government. This sounds a bit far-fetched as the army in Pakistan need not put in so much effort just to put the civilians in their place. There are multiple other versions of the story as well which apportion the responsibility on Haqqani, Izaz and Zardari in varying proportions.
Raheel Sharif, the current Chief of Army Staff in Pakistan, is a step ahead of Kayani in asserting the military’s supremacy. The handsome mandate with which Nawaz Sharif was elected raised hopes of restoring some balance to civil-military relations in Pakistan. But that remained an elusive goal. The army effectively exploited the protests by the cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan and a religious preacher Tahirul Qadri to renegotiate the power sharing arrangement with the civilian government. The defence and foreign policy, especially with respect to Kashmir and Afghanistan, was re-assumed by the military. The army also got the Nawaz Sharif government to go slow on the treason case being heard against former army chief Pervez Musharraf.
The Pakistan army also retains a free hand in dealing with internal security. The army’s case was helped by Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan indulging in several high-profile attacks thus weakening the Nawaz Sharif’s initial urge to settle the problem via dialogue. In a recent move, Sartaz Aziz, the trusted man of Nawaz Sharif, was replaced by retired Lt General Naseer Khan Janjua, a trusted man of Raheel Sharif, as the national security adviser (NSA). With this move, the Pakistan army hopes, they have someone to match Ajit Doval in the India-Pakistan NSA-level dialogues. Not surprisingly, the two NSAs met in Bangkok on 6 December.
Mindful of the fact that Nawaz Sharif is an old-style wily politician, Raheel Sharif himself visits important foreign destinations. Just weeks after Nawaz Sharif’s visit to the US, Raheel Sharif made his own visit even without an invitation. The visiting delegations, sometimes even heads of state, to Pakistan make it a point to meet Raheel Sharif.
While he is still the Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif has ceded the real authority to the other Sharif. He was alluding to the same in Kathmandu during the secret meeting with Modi. If he was not saying something similar in Paris—and I believe he was not, given the proliferation of cameras all around—in a brief but animated discussion with Modi on the sidelines of the climate summit, whatever else he was talking does not have much value.
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