When a Pakistani leader, civilian or military, rakes up Kashmir against India, it shows a desperate attempt to clutch at last attempts at public support at home. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's facetious invitation to India for talks falls in this category. Sharif is hardly a popular leader and is today burdened with cataclysmic problems confronting Pakistan and its millions. He did inherit much of the problems but his leadership failure stems from his inability to deal with governance problems of the flour crisis, flood relief measures and to deal with the military diktat. His over-dependence on his elder brother in London causes him to tumble more often.
Sharif, with a soft corner for the Generals, has managed to keep a sinking boat of his party floating through a soft image and silence against military crimes. He has rarely spoken against media clampdown, human rights violations, missing Baloch and Pakhtuns and massive corruption by the military and its multiple agencies. He is acutely aware that his party, once a powerful Punjabi party, relies heavily on the military not upping the ante for survival. His task is not made easier by his own ambitious coalition partners hobnobbing with Rawalpindi.
Sharif, on the backfoot for long because of his elder brother's love-hate relationship with the Generals, wants to retrieve the lost glory of his political career. But unlike his elder brother, twice Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, he does not have the gumption to take on the military to rule like a Prime Minister. He is therefore caught literally between the deep sea and devil and hence remains a failed premier.
Sharif is also trapped between two superpowers, the US and China, clamouring to usurp Pakistan for their strategic games in the region and beyond. The English daily, Dawn, wrote in its latest editorial about the US games - "Still licking its wounds after a humiliating, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States probably wants to revive its so-called 'war on terror' once again, taking Pakistan on board."
China, with its proposed investment over $60 billion, wants its pound of flesh from Pakistan to extend its strategic reach beyond western Asia. In between is the Islamic world led by Saudi Arabia which wants the nuclear-powered Pakistan to be a willing jockey to its own power play. Sharif is hardly equipped to balance these compelling and complex equations and has easily let the Generals run the foreign office.
What has been his biggest failure is the gross mismanagement of flood rehabilitation, flour crisis and economic downslide. These failures have had a direct impact on the living conditions of ordinary people with hunger, malnutrition, poverty and gender violence rising sharply over the last few months. Sharif cannot lay these failures at any step but his own government's. He could have done better if he had chosen to side with the people and not the landlords who run the country from their palatial bungalows in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Dubai and London - his family is one of the richest and influential landowners of Punjab.
Having failed on all leadership fronts, Sharif has turned to Kashmir to gather public support. This is nothing but a typical duplicitous move - to choose a subject which Pakistan has no locus standi to seek any redress. Sharif knows quite well that Pakistan has fought several wars and a prolonged proxy war in vain to stir international support for Kashmir, all to mislead its own people and keep them impoverished. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's talk of a dialogue with India is nothing but part of the long history of hoodwiking its own people on false sentiments and is not worthy of any response.
