No noose is good news

General Pervez Musharraf, already fighting a rearguard battle against opinion-makers labelling Pakistan a rogue nation and his regime an illegitimate one, would have had to be extremely blind, stupidly cussed, or foolishly brave, to have despatched his one-time leader to his maker. Even the benign influence of the peripatetic William Jefferson Clinton may have had a salutary effect. Indeed, there has been some speculation that the four-hour halt the US president so kindly bestowed upon the General was in lieu of leniency being shown to Sharif among other concessions.

For Sharif, it is nothing short of a great escape. To have expected to walk out of court a free man would have been in the the realm of fantasy. A life sentence was the best that he could have hoped for. Far too many uncertainties had, in any case, marked the progress of his trial. Not only did the former director-general of civil aviation, Ameenullah Choudhry, turn approver in the case and depose against him, his senior-most counsel, Iqbal Radh, was gunned down by unidentified assailants on March 10. What was even more intriguing was the inability of his party colleagues to mount an active resistance to the General. Although they maintained that their leader was being framed, they desisted from taking their case to the streets. Apart from the immediate family in the best traditions of subcontinental politics, wife Kulsoom blossomed into a full-blown political activist there was a conspicuous lack of popular anger against the incarceration of a premier who had come to power for the second time just over acouple of years ago, after a landslide victory.

Sharif knows intimately the vicissitudes of Pakistani politics. It was, after all, the aircrash of 1988, the same one that saw General Zia-ul-Haq disappear from the scene, which had catapulted Sharif to the forefront of his country’s politics and given his party, the Pakistan Muslim League, a national relevance. In his early 50s, he has time on his side. So even as he files his appeal against the verdict and ruminates over his fate in his dark prison cell, he should take heart at the gift of life that has been given him. He could also, if he chooses, draw inspiration from the lines penned Z.A.Bhutto his illustrious, if unfortunate, predecessor in the last days of his life. Wrote Bhutto: “I was born to make a nation, to serve a people, to overcome an impending doom. I am not born to wither away in a death cell and to mount the gallows to fulfil the vindictive lust of an ungrateful and treacherous man…"