The man soon to be Pakistan’s president suffers from psychiatric disorders, including dementia, reveals The Financial Times, based on Asif Ali Zardari’s medical reports, and Nawaz Sharif will agree wholeheartedly. Despair is the feeling that defines the public mood in Pakistan over the past few days. The prospect of Zardari occupying the presidency haunts the people. Given his reputation for corruption and wheeling-dealing, what will he not do for personal gains if he becomes the most powerful man in the country, they ask.

After Monday’s parting of ways between Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, the people have also discovered what the former thinks of political undertakings and agreements signed with coalition partners. There are no divine decrees that cannot be transgressed against, says Zardari. Then, facing a media uproar the next day, he has the gall to play the humiliated victim over national TV, apologising to Sharif for broken promises, and inviting him back into the fold. Is this the man who will be the next president of a country that now stands so deeply divided, with the three smaller provinces endorsing Zardari’s candidacy, as if ganging up on their big, bad brother, Sharif’s Punjab?   

Zardari is by no means a controversial person in Punjab alone. Another coalition partner, the Frontier-based Maulana Fazlur Rahman, who is known for his ambivalent rhetoric, called a party meeting to decide whether the rightist Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam would support Zardari’s candidacy and, if so, under what terms and conditions. Those sent to the PPP pertain to calling off military action against Islamists in NWFP, which Zardari has vowed will continue after the government banned the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.

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