'Naya' Nawaz Sharif? - Gateway House

This month, Nawaz Sharif will be sworn in as the Prime Minister of Pakistan for the third time. His Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) won a majority of more than 120 seats in the contested 272-seat Parliament, with the closest competitors being the Pakistan Peoples Party and Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tareek-e-Insaf (PTI) with roughly 30 seats each.

This is a historic moment for Pakistan. Apart from this being the first peaceful civilian transfer of power in the 66 years of its nationhood, Sharif’s near majority will bring to Pakistan something it has not had for a long time: stability.

This will enable Sharif to call the shots and carefully choose his nominees to the country’s top ministerial and bureaucratic positions. Sharif has run a thriving conglomerate of steel, sugar, textiles, paper and engineering called Sharif Group (giving him a personal net worth of $4 billion). His business background will give him a natural advantage in reviving Pakistan’s economy, grown anaemic from neglect, feudalism and excessive military ownership, if corruption can be kept at bay. Internationally he is less tainted – he is a pre-9/11 Pakistani leader, who has escaped the distorted relationship that Pakistan currently has with the U.S. and NATO, and was last seen from Indian eyes as a pre-Kargil leader welcoming former Prime Minister Vajpayee on a peace bus riding into Lahore. Incumbent Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has already sent an invitation to Sharif to visit India.

But these advantages are offset by two other serious challenges. First, Sharif will have to develop and define a relationship with the army, which engineered a coup against him in 1999, and which has been so dominant through Pakistan’s history. Second, he will have to contain the immoderate parties like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and Jamaat-ud-Dawah with which he has long had linkages. Indeed, Sharif comes with a legacy of close relations with Pakistani terrorist groups as also Saudi Arabia, a country which has been funding terrorist activity for decades and which negotiated Sharif’s exit from Pakistan with the military, by offering him refuge for eight years on the condition he conduct no political activity. His links – and those of Imran Khan – with some of these groups are evident from the fact that both parties were allowed to campaign freely, without having their candidates or rallies characterised as secular and hence targeted for violence.

Sharif seems like he has put his best sub-continental foot forward by promising to appoint a commission on the Mumbai 26/11 attacks of 2008. His word will have gravitas when he appoints a credible commission to investigate the issue seriously. He could also express some condolence for the attacks; it will be a fitting start to doing business with the traders and corporations of Mumbai, who are ready for a cross-border trade exchange.

Pakistan and India can surely forge ties through economics, without rankling the extremists on both sides of the border. A logical start is at the pre-Kargil point. In 1998, India and Pakistan trade was $187 million, peace talks had gained traction, and a normalization had begun. In the last decade, with the push for peace from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, trade has improved to $2.3 billion but any kind of detente has been shelved, especially after the 2008 attacks. Sharif can immediately grant India Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status, starting the flow of goods. Indian IT and engineering products to Pakistan, and Pakistani textile and cement to India, says Arun Nanda, director at Mahindra Group who recently visited Pakistan, are ideal initial exchanges. India’s experience in alternate energy sources like solar and rice husks can be transferred to Pakistani entities, helping to ease that country’s acute power crisis.

Also on the agenda should be the issue of water. One of the world’s most successful water-sharing agreements is the Indus Water Treaty negotiated under the aegis of the World Bank and signed between India and Pakistan in 1960. The treaty is coming up for review in 2014, and the fundamentalists are already calling unwelcome attention to it. Given the acute misuse of water, leading to its scarcity in the southern reaches of the Indus in Sindh province, this is an opportunity for Sharif to address it in a reasonable, business-like manner. It is necessary to preserve the ecology and economies of the sub-continent – or have the agony prolonged by fundamentalists like Hafiz Saeed of the Jamaat-ud-Dawah who have tried to turn it into an emotive India-Pakistan issue, and dictate the water agenda of the region.

Beyond the sub-continent, Sharif will have to make some hard choices. While he has been opposed to the use of drones on Pakistani territory, he has to confront the fact that with the U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan coming up, drones will be the only form of military hardware the U.S. will use to achieve its goal of hunting down terrorists. He is also known to have a relationship of trust with the Taliban – a wild card in the on-going efforts of the U.S. to negotiate with the Taliban as they pull out of the region. His decisions on both issues will be closely watched.

Will Sharif prove to be his country’s saviour, one that can make Pakistan the ambitious transit economy it can be and the secular leader of the Muslim world that its founding father had envisioned it as?

And what of Imran Khan, who will have to win his spurs in one of Pakistan’s two most difficult provinces – Kyber Pakhtunkhwa, which has voted for him but which is seething with terrorist activities. The Swat region needs rebuilding – first from the 2005 earthquake and then from the destruction of an army fighting extremists in 2007 – no easy job. Like Sharif, he too is at ease with the terrorist groups; but unlike Sharif, is believed to also have the blessings of the Pakistan Army. He will probably be the leader of the opposition – and a future challenge to Sharif if he can build a serious grassroots party organisation.

The chances of a squandered opportunity in the ‘naya’ Pakistan are high – much as has been with Manmohan Singh who has stalled an economy growing at 9.5%, to 4.5%. Pakistan has a young population – roughly 60% are under the age of 25, mostly uneducated and unemployed. They need jobs, dignity and hope. The Pakistani army’s goals of holding Afghanistan for ‘strategic depth’ against India remain unchanged; with the withdrawal of western forces next year, the newly elected political leaders must present an alternative plan.

New Delhi must look at the new dispensation next door with clear eyes. Our own national elections are less than a year away in 2014, and the government is unsteady. Its handling of the recent incursion by China into Indian territory has raised questions about its ability and credibility within the country – and in an already turbulent neighbourhood. Its room for making any grand peace overtures to Pakistan is severely constrained.

The most needed and least controversial angle from which India and Pakistan’s new government can begin to engage is through business and trade – and let the relationship generate its own steam from that position.

Ambassador Neelam Deo is Director of Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations and former Ambassador to Denmark and former Joint Secretary for Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Manjeet Kripalani is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

This article was exclusively written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. You can read more exclusive content here.

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