Mian Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari are the world’s unlikeliest bedfellows. It is like a python entering into wedlock with a wolf. Yet Maulana Fazal ur Rehman went to Jaati Umra for match-making. This time it was on the initiative of Asif Ali Zardari. It seems Mian Nawaz Sharif had reservations about the intentions behind the marriage. The ex-Prime Minister probably thought the proposer i.e Asif Ali Zardari had not only done nothing to support him in the Panama scenario, but also had delivered a damaging blow to the PMLN in the Senate Chairman’s election.
Yet the very next day Mian’s younger and equally beleaguered brother was seen being escorted into the National Assembly session with loving and caring smile on his face. Mian Shahbaz however seemed sullen but also gave an impression of being well-pampered. After all it was he who on numerous occasions had publicly announced his resolve to drag Zardari into the streets and cut open his belly to recover the nation’s millions that he had eaten away. Zardari seemed magnanimous in having forgotten all that in his enthusiasm to become a part of the Sharif family.
Zardari’s enthusiasm is understandable. He finds himself being drawn deeper and deeper into a sinister and deadly quagmire as a result of the FIA’s highly damaging, findings regarding countless disclosures about non-entities and deprived persons owning bank accounts with transactions running into billions. Zardari’s protégés and frontmen are already behind the bars and he alongwith his enormously wealthy sister, Faryal are on ‘bail before arrest’.
These are ominous happenings for the PPP leadership. Whereas ‘Sharifs’ are in the stranglehold of the NAB which is an autonomous body, Zardari and company are on the hitlist of the FIA under the orders of the Supreme Court. “The looters will be taken to task” seems to have become a national song.
Will the unlikely marriage between the mutually hostile looters succeed in blocking the inevitable from happening? The sinister APC that the thoroughly humiliated Maulana Fazal ur Rahman is trying to launch is unlikely to change the direction of a ferocious storm closing in on those whose Plunder of Pakistan now is unlikely to escape unpunished.