When Mian Nawaz Sharif set out to lobby for polls boycott, his obvious destination was to confer with Benazir Bhutto, who he knew was all set to fight the elections, notwithstanding her lip service to the ‘boycott options’. He could not have done otherwise as his allies in the APDM insisted that the boycott option would be a meaningful course of action only, if the entire opposition would subscribe to it. Thus, it was understandable why the APDM, despite war cries by Qazi Hussein Ahmad and Imran Khan, had kept the door open for a U-turn by deciding to boycott the polls in ‘principle’, while making no move to withdraw the nomination papers filed by its component parties. To rope in the PPP on the ‘boycott option’ was indeed an ‘impossible mission’, since Benazir Bhutto was not prepared to follow a ‘confrontationist line’ by setting pre-conditions, which she knew would be unacceptable to the regime. A convenient way out of a deadlock situation was to negotiate a mutually agreed ‘Charter of Demands’, to which both Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto agreed in their high profile meeting. Critics said it was an exercise in futility since there was no way Benazir Bhutto could be persuaded to dump the elections for the sake of opposition’s unity. While others suspected that Nawaz Sharif mission was an eyewash to placate the ‘boycott lobby’ heralded by the lawyers and human rights activists.
Ironically the two sides took the job of uniting the opposition on the election issue rather seriously as they lost no time to enter into talks for formulating a ‘Charter of Demands’, which it was said, would be presented to the regime. The negotiators believed they had made good progress, since they said they had reached a consensus on all the issues included in the proposed charter, barring two sticking points. However, their optimism was misplaced, since the so-called sticking powers were the real bones of contention between the APDM and the PPP. Nawaz Sharif and his allies in the APDM had all along been saying that the restoration of deposed judges was their top priority for ending their ‘boycott’ and there would be no compromise whatsoever on this issue. The PPP, as was expected refused to raise the issue in the Charter of Demands, saying the matter could only be settled by the next parliament. However, what intrigued the observers was the causal manner of both Benazir and Nawaz Sharif, with which they awaited the outcome of talks on the so-called ‘Charter of Demands’. While Benazir left for Dubai without pronouncing its demise, Nawaz Sharif told media persons ‘we are stilling perusing the matter with the PPP on the question of deposed judges.
The much-awaited APDM meeting was the anti-climax. In the backdrop of high key boycott rhetoric one had expected the APDM to stick to its guns. On the contrary one witnessed a disappointing show of wriggling out from a firm commitment. Ironically, the Sharif brothers who were the high priests of the boycott option were conveniently not present on the scene of action when their ‘proxy’ tamely announced that since the APDM had failed to reach consensus on the issue the component parties were now free to go their own way -- to boycott or to participate in the elections. His efforts to disguise the harsh reality were fruitless as Mian Nawaz Sharif was the one who choose to jump the elections bandwagon, leaving his partners in the lurch. And critics said the boycott option had eventually turned out to be a gimmick contrived by Nawaz Sharif to gain respectability as a more genuine adversary of Musharraf regime than Benazir Bhutto was. Small wonder some observers have been led to believe that the Sharif brothers had rushed to Pakistan explicitly to participate in the elections, and there is no way they could have opted for an uncertain agitation while their arch political rival, Benazir Bhutto was out in the field catching votes.
As the boycott option has now came a real cropper and all the principal political actors in the country are likely to focus on electioneering rather than agitating for one or the other issue. Vocal sections of the civil society, like lawyers and media persons, who have been urging the opposition parties to stand by them in protest against subjugation of judiciary and curb on electronic media, would feel the pinch of being let down by the oracles of ‘no truck with the dictatorial regime’. Whatever made the ‘boycotters’ change course; weather it was the fear that they would be leaving the field open for others, or the pressure from the rank and file, now is the time to try to win over the electorate by raising issues which would appeal to them as questions that relate to their day-to-day life.
