In the face of the wholesale arrests of opposition leaders to thwart a long march on Islamabad under the notorious Section 144 of the penal code, which is reminiscent of the colonial-time highhandedness, what Sharif is forgetting is that a soaring public support for a politician is not enough in Pakistan. The country is not all politically above board; it never has been. Often the hidden hands working behind the scenes exercise real power, and not those who seem to be in charge. Public support alone could not save Zulfikar Ali and Benazir Bhutto from meeting their tragic fates. Sharif has never been half as popular.

What Zardari is forgetting is that it’s only a matter of time when the civil-military establishment and the United States will come to sense his own unpopularity with the people and even with many in his own party, and let matters take their own course. This happened in the case of Musharraf less than a year ago. What’s to stop it from happening again to a man that neither the US nor the army has invested in for as long as they had in Musharraf? Zardari fails to realise that the Pakistan army, given its choices, never wants to be seen as acting against the will of the people, but rather as their guardian and saviour who intervenes when politicians have failed to provide stability. The US under Barack Obama is a different country from the one known to Pakistanis under George W. Bush. Washington, too, is least likely to bank on a leader who is being seen as ruling by the stick, negating his party’s democratic credentials and acting like a worse autocrat than his predecessor. During his eight years of virtual one-man rule, Musharraf had never once banned public protest against his policies, much less arrest politicians for opposing his government.

That his surrogates, the MQM in Karachi and the PML-Q in Punjab, did indeed do so in an underhand way at times to please their master and benefactor general is another story. The MQM’s virtual sealing of Karachi on May 12, 2007 to prevent the deposed chief justice from entering the city after he had landed there, and the PML-Q’s sealing of the opposition Jamaat-i-Islami headquarters to prevent anti-Musharraf rallies in Lahore, or its crackdown on Sharif supporters to prevent them from going to Islamabad airport to receive their leader coming back from exile in September 2007, were the only occasions. However, both the MQM and the PML-Q denied that they had ordered any preventive measures to keep the people from exercising their right to protest; they sheepishly shifted the blame of such measures taken on the local police.

This time round, Zardari cannot even hide behind any such excuse. His ministers and advisors have made no bones about having ordered a crackdown on opposition and civil society leaders to prevent them from converging on the capital to demand the restoration of the pre-November 3 judiciary, and that Zardari fulfil his other promises including restoring parliament’s sovereignty vested in it by the constitution, and which Musharraf stole by amassing all powers in the president. Many in the People’s Party itself find Zardari’s brand of politics as lacking morality and thus untenable. An old Bhutto loyalist, PPP’s Senator Raza Rabbani, resigned from the cabinet in protest a day before Zardari nominated his own loyalist and a newcomer, Farooq Naek, for the post of Senate chairman. There are expected to be more fissures of the kind within the party in the weeks ahead, as Zardari’s own trusted men replace those who enjoyed Benazir Bhutto’s confidence.

By reverting to their pre-1999 confrontational politics, when the army successfully took turns to play up the People’s Party and the Muslim League against one another, Sharif and Zardari have let the people down. Between the two of them, perhaps Zardari is seen as being more blameworthy after he sacked the Punjab government last month and imposed governor’s rule in the country’s most populous and historically influential province. The sentiment in Punjab is predominantly for the restoration of the pre-November 3, 2007 judiciary when Musharraf had sent some 60 high court and supreme court judges packing after imposing emergency rule.

The current higher courts are believed to have been packed with “friendly” judges by Zardari; the supreme court’s decision last month to disqualify the Sharif brothers from contesting for or holding any public office has found little approval with the people. Zardari’s failure to retain Sharif as a coalition partner has also raised question marks in the minds of the other coalition partners in the Frontier and Balochistan, for instance. His cosying up to the PML-Q, seen as Musharraf’s legacy, has definitely ruffled a few feathers within the PPP itself; the party’s old guard loyalists are now all but history.

Ironically, less than a year after a democratic government took charge, the ball is back in the army’s court as the arbiter of political justice. If Sharif can sustain the popularity of his protest movement despite the government’s desperate efforts to contain it, the generals may think about renewing their contacts with the “devil” they certainly know better than they do Zardari. His government has precious little to show in terms of its accomplishments in the eleven months it has been in office, much less any tangible sense of approval for its controversial policies so far. Fewer today expect any good coming from Zardari than they did a year ago, albeit, also then, against their better judgment.

The writer is an editor with ‘Dawn’, Karachi

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