The Man who would be King

Within that shiny head of his, Nawaz Sharif carries a vision. The
readers may wonder at the mention of "vision" and "Nawaz Sharif" in
the same sentence, so let me break this news to you. Despite his
clumsiness in words and acts, despite the fact that he takes second
place to almost everyone imaginable intellectually, Nawaz Sharif is a
dreamer, and like his girth, his dreams are getting bigger by the day.

This small-time businessman-turned-politician has seen his fortunes
skyrocket over the last decade. Not only has he slithered up the
political ladder from a subservient Chief Minister to an unsure Prime
Minister, his wealth has grown a hundred fold, easily making him one
of the richest people in Pakistan. Divine grace alone is not
responsible for this, he has amply profitted from government loans and
grants which have never been paid back and from inumerable political
transactions of various degrees of illegitimacy.

But let us be fair to the man, he is only one of the villians in an
infected political landscape. The problem that Pakistan has to deal
with is that he is in power and that he is intent on getting that
dream of his. He has achieved everything that a politician or a
businessman could dream of. All except one.

This man wants to be a king.

Day in and day out, during his long satisfying naps in the Prime
Minister house, during his snoozing sessions in the Parliament, his
dreaming mind repeats the following words unendingly: King Nawaz
Sharif the First.

Like the other monarchs of the Middle East whom he idolizes, Nawaz
Sharif wants Pakistan to be the estate of his family. After him, he
wants his son, King Hussain Nawaz Sharif the First, to rule
Pakistan. He wants a new kingdom, Sharifi Pakistan, with his family
and his cohorts at the helm and a puppet parliament at their feet. He
dreams of sitting on a throne, wearing a crown and flitting through
the public with pomp and circumstance. He dreams of building twenty
more palaces more lavish and grandiose than the one he has in his
Raiwind estate. He wants his word to be the final authority, to carry
the power of life and death over each and every soul in Pakistan. And
finally, yes sir, he wants his face on every bank note, on every
cross-road, on every public building and on each and every second of
media broadcasting within Pakistan.

Chances are he might succeed. It's not impossible, after all nearly
everyone in the Arab world is doing that!

Let's count what he's got in his hands. The army, a country on the
brink of collapse, a public weary of incessant chaos, great personal
wealth, extremely rich and powerful companions and finally, the newly
released genie of nuclear weapons.

His plan is roughly as follows. Sustain an environment of insecurity
to keep the public weary, manipulate the public into giving him
increasingly more authority, use his power to remove all opposition
and herald his achievements through state-controlled media. A simple
algorithm that, if followed carefully, will surely and steadily bring
him to the fulfillment of his dream.

The Talibanization of Pakistan, the carefully orchestrated collapse of
law and order in the country, the artificially inflated arms race, the
rapidly increasing wealth of a few and the ever-intensifying
propoganda war are just a few elements of this game. The formula is
simple, turn up the heat yourself, find a scapegoat, punish the
scapegoat, take credit, reduce civil liberties, increase personal
power and wallah! you ride that elevator of public approval/apathy a
couple of stories up.

But there's a problem. There are those who have a habit of complaining
too much. These are the people who complain about Pakistan's poverty,
about its illiteracy, about the dispossession of its people, about the
dizzying disparity of wealth and about the high-handedness of its
government. These are the people who no longer complain that the body
of Pakistan is plagued by various cancers, but rather that this body
is almost all cancer. These people watch with horrified eyes the storm
of poverty, disease, blood and death that awaits us in the coming
decades.

The problem is that someone might listen to these people. And once
they do, they might recognize where their country is headed. And
knowing that, they might not agree with their leaders. What a fine
mess would that be then!

In his characteristic subtlety, our future king removes what he cannot
silence. To put it another way, he has the finesse of a battering ram.