'Quietly triumphant' Sharif turns screw on Musharraf

After more than seven years in exile, Pakistan's former PM is back in power and doing his best to depose the president. Julian Borger goes to visit him at the family home outside Lahore

• Wednesday April 16 2008

Nawaz Sharif (l) and Asif Ali Zardari (r) during a meeting at Parliament House prior to the national assembly's first session in Islamabad. Photograph: Zulfiqar Balti/Pakistan Muslim League-N party/AP

The road to Nawaz Sharif's house performs some radical zigzags along the way. This is presumably for security purposes - forcing would be suicide-bombers to slow down enough for the guards to take a shot. But the winding drive must also serve as a daily reminder for Sharif of the precarious route to power in Pakistan.

He has twice been prime minister. His last term was cut short in 1999 by a coup by his army chief, Pervez Musharraf. Nine years on, Musharraf is still president but has been haemorrhaging authority for months in the face of public disdain.

Sharif is back from exile and back in power, this time as part of a new democratically elected coalition, and working hard to sideline the president with the aim of eventually forcing him out.

Meanwhile, as part of the compromise that has brought the coalition to power, Sharif is not in a government post but instead wields power as head of his party, the Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N), from his home in Raiwind, outside Lahore.

Home, in Sharif's case, is an imposing white mansion, topped by a glass dome, set deep in an extensive compound owned by the family, which made a fortune in business after Pakistan's partition from India. It was to protect the family's business interests that Nawaz was initially sent into politics by his father more than 30 years ago.

The military ransacked the Sharif compound after Musharraf seized power in 1999. But in the five months Sharif has been back in the country, the big house has been restored to its original splendour.

There is a stuffed lion prowling just inside the door, and huge Persian silk carpets adorn the floors and walls of its vast rooms. Stepping outside, the man of the house shows off a cricket pitch being laid in the grounds. His mood can best be described as quietly triumphant.

"A lot of people were saying very confidently, including President Musharraf, that I wouldn't be back in my country by 2011, and look what God has done," he said. "We have had this huge victory."

There is still much to be done to make the new coalition fully functional. There are still jobs to be divided up with the other senior partner, the Pakistan People's Party, run by Asif Ali Zardari, who has emerged as the country's other principal power broker since the assassination in December of his wife, Benazir Bhutto.

Sharif and Zardari have been arguing about the restoration of judges summarily fired by Musharraf. Zardari wants legislation to be passed first to redefine the judiciary's position. His critics accuse him of stalling out of fear that the restored courts may reopen old corruption charges against him.

They also say Zardari is under pressure from the Americans to block the return to the supreme court of the ousted chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, who is likely to reopen legal proceedings against Musharraf, Washington's closet ally in the region.

Sharif insists that the complete restoration of the judges is a "matter of principle".

"This is about the independence of the judiciary," he said.

The declarations would perhaps have more resonance if Sharif's own supporters had not ransacked the supreme court building when it had the temerity to contemplate a legal case against him while he was in office.

Sharif is well aware that Chaudhry's return to the court is the quickest and surest way of getting rid of Musharraf, who he refuses to recognise as president.

This is an awkward position to take under the constitution. Ministers from the PML-N, after all, had to take the oath of office in front of the president. But Sharif insists their hearts were not in it.

"They took the oath under protest, wearing black pants, and just taking the oath and rushing out of the presidency, without even meeting him," he said.

This is not, of course, the first battle of nerves between Sharif and Musharraf. In 1999, aware that Musharraf was planning a coup, Sharif tried to replace him while the army chief was in the air, flying home from a foreign trip.

Sharif tried to block the plane, a commercial airliner full of civilian passengers, from landing until it only had a few minutes fuel left. Little wonder the feud between the two men is so toxic.

This time, Sharif is hoping to bleed Musharraf's power away drop by drop, and he believes he is close to succeeding.