By Kamran Rehmat/Islamabad
Nobody calls him just “Sheikh”, or “Rashid”, or even “Ahmed”. It has to be “Sheikh Rashid”. But that’s just on TV programmes. In real life, and sometimes in newspapers, he is more often than not referred to as “Sheeda Tully” - “the Rashid who rang the bell.”
The tonga man: Sheikh Rashid who used to deride one-man parties is in the same league now
The nom de guerre sits well on him for he is the bad boy of politics who many right-of-centre types like because when he is in power he styles himself as one from the lower social ranks who braved the odds to seat himself in the cabinet where irrespective of their religious leanings usually only the super rich sit on decisions. Or when in the opposition, he is the politico who is always prophesying the doom of the left-of-centre types that represents more a wish than a transformation.
But he is even better known as the politician who is always badmouthing democracy in the style of an above-reproach elder who knows best. Except that he doesn’t know best.
His predictions of doom for both the governments of President Asif Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party at the centre and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N in the Punjab province have proven wrong despite the four years in which he has had the chance to come right.
Nor did Husain Haqqani, former ambassador to the US, turn an approver in the infamous memo case as he had famously predicted. Once the beloved of his electorate, between 1985 and 2002 he was elected, usually by big margins, as a member of the National Assembly - the lower house of Pakistan’s bicameral legislature - each time a general election was held during the period.
The beginning of the end of his political career was the 2008 elections where he was routed by his erstwhile PML-N when constituency outsider Javed Hashmi - who himself has recently switched to Imran Khan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf - beat him by a massive margin.
His defeat was complete in by-elections the same year when Hashmi, who also ran from Multan and chose to retain his seat from his home constituency and vacate the Pindi seat.
Two successive losses on home ground was a stigma so big to Sheikh Rashid that he had announced ahead of the by-polls he would take the hint and quit politics if his electorates didn’t want him. No luck for his electorates since he went back on his words. Which is not too surprising after his big lie in the 2002 general election - the last one he won.
Many now believe he won because he had promised during the campaign trail as an independent candidate that he would “offer his win” to Nawaz Sharif and PML-N, both of whom he betrayed by supporting their ouster by the military led by General Musharraf.
After winning, he not only did not keep his word, he joined Musharraf’s cabinet first as information minister and then as railways minister. Many now believe that his defeats in 2008 are his punishment from his electorate, who handed PML-N victories from his constituencies.
Sheikh Rashid has always been a colourful character mixing populist rhetoric with the idiom of the street, which borders on the crass.
He is known for his tongue-in-cheek political one-liners that aim to demean opponents in the style of folk jesters - indeed his most infamous poisonous one-liners about Benazir Bhutto, which he repeatedly uttered in the 1990 elections campaign trail are unprintable.
This kind of forked syntax has helped keep him in the public consciousness with a big helping hand by the expanding television current affairs sector of the past five years.
Indeed such is the “value” of his style of growly opinion that takes below-the-belt digs at opponents that he actually gets talk shows audiences. He is one of three people who guarantee instant ratings high on TV talk shows - the other being Imran Khan and Marvi Memon.
It suits both parties - the talk show becomes hit with him on show and he gets to stay in public limelight thanks to the channels.
Without the channels to give him the “oxygen of publicity”, as they call it, Sheikh Rashid would have faded in 2008 along with his Awami Muslim League party which is a one-man army. All of this is ironic because all his life he has reserved special scorn for “tonga parties”, as he called them - political groups that are or have been essentially one-man shows.
But in the “one man army” that his personal political philosophy represents the key word is not “one” or even “man”, it’s “army”. For he is an unabashed defender of the military. Whether he is a conscientious believer in these institutions is debatable, but what is not is that his electoral constituency is where the military headquarters is based. He is therefore “technically”, if not politically, beholden to be the voice of the army.
He has also tried his hand at being a writer. He is the author of Farzand-e-Pakistan, the self-styled “son of Pakistan”, a nod to his other self-styled nom de guerre Farzand-e-Pindi, or the “Son of Pindi”.
He is reportedly now working on a second book tentatively titled, Sub Achha Hai, or “All is Well”, an acerbic take, no doubt, that all is not well in Pakistan. No doubt because he thinks he is not in the parliament, Pakistan is paying for being thus amiss.
That he has never married also lends him another rarity in politics. He also matches his theatrical personality with a grand fireworks show come every August 14, the Independence Day, at probably Rawalpindi’s most recognised historical landmark (other than the drab and inaccessible GHQ), the Lal Haveli - his beautiful ancestral mansion.
His principal source of income is stated to be silk business, which probably is one of the reasons that make him a smooth operator.
These days Sheikh Rashid merely comes across as someone so dejected with Pakistan’s future that he curses the intelligence of those who vote for “looters and plunderers” again and again. He conveniently forgets that he is one of the few politicians in active politics that served not one but two military dictators, making his sermons on “true democracy” hollow.
**** The writer is a freelance journalist based in Islamabad and can be reached at [email protected]