On the first working day of the current week Mohammad Shehbaz Sharif hosted a grand dinner. Except Jamaat-e-Islami, representatives of all Opposition parties were invited there. We were made to believe that after spending many months in jail, the Opposition Leader in the National Assembly and the President of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) was now preparing to vigorously bounce back into the political game. 

His first priority appeared developing a narrative, all the opposition parties should warmly own and forcefully promote through energetic participation in National Assembly proceedings. Although three National Assembly sittings have been held after the said dinner but Shehbaz Sharif didn’t attend any of them. 

In his absence, most PML-N members of the National Assembly don’t feel too motivated. They come to the House only for a while, primarily to mark their attendance. Hardly a person from their benches is willing to take any initiative, even to please galleries and with obvious intent of claiming space in media. Their indifference facilitates the government to smoothly proceed with an agenda of its own priority. 

Like Shehbaz Sharif, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the youthful Chairman of Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP), also appears to have lost interest in assembly proceedings. After getting elected as member of the National Assembly, for the first time in July 2018, he had regularly been attending these proceedings. With remarkable speed, he mastered the skill of stealing attention and often delivered content-rich speeches loaded with teasing wit.

For the past many weeks, however, he prefers to stay put in Karachi and disregard whatever is happening in Islamabad. His party representatives keep attempting to stir things in the national assembly, but don’t appear pursuing any well-defined agenda.

Like the opposition leaders, most ministers are also not very keen to actively participate in parliamentary business. The lackluster conduct of otherwise the number-strong opposition has also turned them indifferent to happening in the national assembly. Little wonder, the quorum was often missing in Friday sitting and it had to be prorogued for the lack of it.

Governments in all democratic countries prefer to treat legislative forums like the noisy and attention-splitting bodies. It remains the burden of opposition members to furnish energy and dynamism to parliamentary business. But in spite of having 80-plus members on its benches, crowded with very experienced parliamentarians, the PML-N has increasingly failed to establish its presence.

The party visibly appears enduring bi-polar bouts and keeps jumping from hawkish to pragmatic posturing. It could yet not decide whether to confront the government with do or die drive or develop some rules of engagement with it until holding of the next election.

After being removed from the Prime Minister’s office in 2017, Nawaz Sharif made a desperate attempt to launch a movement to protect and promote what he called the ‘real democracy.’ Vote Koo Izzat Do (respect the vote/public mandate) was coined as the key slogan for the intended movement. To provide strength to it, he left his wife, fighting for life in the last stage of cancer, in a hospital of London. He and his daughter were immediately sent to jail after landing in Lahore. Both of them could also not lead the campaign for viciously contested elections of 2018.

The PML-N failed to collect numbers required to form a government, both in Islamabad and Lahore, after that election. Instead of accepting defeat, it rather projected the election of 2018 as “massively manipulated.” But as the PML-N President, Shehbaz Sharif took the steam out of this story by deciding to sit on the opposition benches in legislative houses his party kept insisting were “created through rigged election.”

He clearly expressed the desire to develop working relations with the Imran Khan government while delivering the maiden speech as the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly. But Imran Khan didn’t want to even casually shake hands with “looters and plunderers.” Thanks to his obsessive ‘war on corruption,’ many top ranking opposition legislators, including Shehbaz Sharif and his son, were nabbed by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and spent many months in jail under charges of indulging in many cases of mega corruption.

For many months, Nawaz Sharif and his daughter also remained in jail. Ms Maryam Nawaz eventually got released on bail, but her father was reported as “critically sick” while in jail. The government felt forced to send him abroad for treatment and after reaching London, he kept mysteriously quiet for many months. Her daughter and apparent political heir also deactivated her social media accounts.

But she suddenly bounced back on the political front, almost with a vengeance in August 2017, when the NAB summoned her to answer questions regarding the purchase of pricey lands in and around Lahore. Soon after her returning to active politics, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari also took the initiative of uniting all the main opposition parties in a grand alliance called Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM). Nawaz Sharif delivered an igniting speech during its inaugural session and vowed to launch a spirited movement, “not against Imran Khan but the selectors of this puppet.”

Within three months of its formation, however, the PDM developed serious in-house differences. Nawaz Sharif and his loyalists pressed that after resigning from assemblies, political parties assembled in the PDM should mobilise people for reaching Islamabad and stay put there until Imran Khan feels forced to resign and call for early elections.

The PPP felt reluctant to support this stance. It considered the same premature and remained stuck to the position that the opposition should seek alternative to the Imran government from within the current National Assembly. It also believes that either/or showdown with the government by activating streets can potentially lead to another military intervention in Pakistan, completely destroying whatever is left of ‘democracy’ here.

Its critics from within the PDM described the PPP position, “opportunistic,” clearly reflecting the desire that the PPP-led government in Sindh should complete its third successive and 5-year-term by all means. But after distancing itself from the PPP, PDM also failed to move further.

That eventually compelled Shehbaz Sharif to begin pleading for “pragmatic options.” Agitation-driven politics has no place among them. He also wants the PML-N to acknowledge its inherent limits, when it comes to rebelliously challenge the guided and power-sharing realities of Pakistan’s state and political structures.

So far, he had been feeling shy of clearly expressing his preferences. Apparently, he didn’t want to openly defy or question the narrative spun and promoted by his elder brother. But his days of reluctance now seem to be over and to prove his ‘determination’ he has begun to air his ideas through granting lengthy interviews to a definite group of journalists, considered influential enjoying active access to quarters, which continue to shape and guide the democratic façade in Pakistan since the early 1950s.

The PML-N mainstream certainly need more time to completely adjust to pragmatic line of Shehbaz Sharif, which no one is yet sure his elder brother will also accept and own, wholeheartedly. Until then, the National Assembly proceedings will also remain insipid.