If someone traveled back in time to 2017 and told a chief that in five years Sheikh Rashid would be detained for insulting Bilawal after falling foul of the establishment, they would be scoffed at. Someone would be referred to a psychiatrist if they stated that Moonis Elahi had severed links with the institution and caused his father to sever the bonds upon which his survival rests.
If they shouted that Fawad Chaudhry had become an anti-establishment hero while being escorted out, they would risk being arrested.
In Pakistani politics, there are various weather vane indicators. All of them have traditionally indicated the direction from which Pindi’s favorable breezes are blowing. Sheikh Rashid, Fawad Chaudhry, and the Chaudhrys of Gujrat have transformed into technologically advanced weather balloons over the course of the last several decades, from being basic tools indicating the establishment’s objectives.
Sheikh Rashid’s whole career
They have repeatedly and with pride predicted impending pressure systems and have even measured seismic activity. Sheikh Rashid’s whole career consists of claiming to have attended school with every incoming army head. Fawad Chaudhry was the favored bully, justifying every move of the hybrid administration that could not be justified.
Pointing towards the Pindi breeze has given the Chaudhrys of Gujrat unaccountable power. They will consistently do exactly what the boys desire or believe they desire. When uncertain, they will hastily approach a garrison and inquire as to what they want. Then, they will explain to everyone that their acts were to the desires of the establishment.
Having elaborated on this metaphor, I’d like to get to the point: why have these weather balloons suddenly stopped functioning? Why do their instrument clusters not work? Why does Sheikh Rashid smoke cigars while restrained? And why is Fawad Chaudhry receiving the same treatment he defended as justifiable for everyone else?
It’s not that political weather vanes are ineffective.
Moonis is engulfed in a variety of money-laundering investigations, with the FIA alleging the presence of transactions that begin with unexplained funds and conclude in the account of an Elahi. His electorate is a little enclave within a division that has been stitched together with massive governmental spending.
Facilitators of the alleged Elahi laundry, who are allegedly the individual nodes in the network of transactions, have risen from basic public jobs to become government secretaries, just as the Elahis themselves have done. How dare Moonis then challenge the dogmatists?
The solution is straightforward. He believes he has a choice between potential and inevitability. Due to a large number of participants in the establishment’s game of thrones, his family’s chips are worthless. When Imran Khan retires, he may be able to take over the hierarchy. Or when he is called upon.
The weather vanes are not malfunctioning. They are doing what they do best, which is pointing in the direction of the strongest wind. However, for the first time, that wind is not flowing from Pindi.
People have believed that the establishment has always desired to separate Shehbaz’s’sheen’ from PML Noon as the original goal, abandoning Maryam’s’meem’ to principled irrelevance.
PML-N has reemerged as the original king’s party
Instead, the PML-N has reemerged as the original king’s party, a reflection of our ceaseless political opportunism. The great hope, Maryam, has been reduced to shilling for the same old status quo for which her father fought.
After 2017, Nawaz Sharif assured us that his politics were like a cracked walnut: after numerous attempts. The hard shell had finally given way to a luscious middle ground.
Instead, it resembles an onion being peeled, with each layer being peeled away by the same old agony of pro-establishment attitudes; it looks like there is yet another layer of the same thing, which is so predictable that it makes your eyes water.
What if the self-proclaimed sher of Punjab had yelled for motives other than self-interest after identifying names in Gujranwala? It’s possible that the political chessboard was vastly different.
At present, the only pieces on the board are pawns. Except for the fact that the Imran Khan pawn has reached the opposite end of the board and is ready to assume a more potent form. No one knows what it will become. But it has seen the edge of the board and the chasm that lies beyond.
The original anti-establishment lion, the PPP, now has a candidate for prime minister in Bilawal. How this is even faintly feasible without an open revelation of the party’s secret marriage with the establishment, given their electoral numbers, remains an intriguing development to come.
Difference in opposition to the hybrid PTI-Bajwa government
After removing the PDM’s bravado with surgical precision every time it threatened to make a difference in opposition to the hybrid PTI-Bajwa government, the PPP obtained what it had always desired: power without an election and a swift resolution of its accountability concerns shortly thereafter. Every step of the way has been a victory for their politics, but democracy and good government have always been absent.
Nawaz Sharif once stated that he stood for principle when everyone else urged him to advance. He claimed that when he took action against the dictatorship, he looked back and saw no one standing behind him. He was abandoned and forced into exile.
Today, those who fought for principle when Nawaz invited them to join him in Gujranwala find themselves alone when they look back. Nawaz is busy putting on boots in London, while his daughter is standing behind barbed wire while addressing her party inside, explaining to us that nepotism in her political party is a result of the people’s love.
