DNA Edit | State of Turmoil: Once again corruption has bitten Nawaz Sharif

Pakistan is in the throes of a fresh but familiar crisis, this time involving the country’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who had once again bitten off more than he could chew and digest. With the unanimous verdict by a five-judge Supreme Court bench forcing him to step down over corruption charges, Sharif, for whom honesty is excess baggage on the political flight, has already put into motion a contingency plan.

Since self-preservation is a natural instinct, the former PM will have to choose a trusted aide or a close relation to secure the throne. He has to maintain tight control over the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party to stave off oblivion.

Sharif’s immediate family finds itself in the same sinking boat that the patriarch now has to steer through the choppy waters of uncertainty. However, it’s not so much the successor saga as the culture of corruption in the top storey of a poor country’s power architecture.

Before the disclosures last year in the Panama Papers that eventually stripped him of power, Sharif had been convicted and sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment for corruption in 2000. At that juncture he was serving a life sentence for hijacking and terrorism, and had cried hoarse over the military government’s attempts to victimise and discredit him.

He proved to be a tough survivor, managing to browbeat his adversaries, even the wily generals, time and again. This time, he has to contend with a strident Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician and a leader of the Opposition who had spearheaded the campaign for his ouster. Khan, it is believed, also enjoys the Army’s confidence.

His dogged perseverance bordering on obsession had culminated in a strong indictment from the apex court, signalling a body blow to Sharif’s ambitions. Ironically, Sharif had at one point in his career symbolised hope for his country where democracy had been held hostage by the military with alarming regularity.

Even today, the political class, however powerful, is beholden to the generals who call the shots from behind the curtains. Curiously, he was in the vanguard when Pakistan made a transition from the military to a civilian government — a watershed in the country’s history. But greed, invariably, got the better of him.

For India, the strategy is simple: to wait and watch for a successor who wouldn’t be any different from the one deposed. In Pakistan, turmoil is the status quo, not stability. Its citizens will have to live with it.