Ejected by the judiciary from his office of Prime Minister and from the leadership of his party, PML (N), Nawaz Sharif has caused a flutter in Pakistan’s bureaucratic roost, civilian as much as the military. He has even deprecated the increasing tendency of the country’s judiciary to function as a “parallel government”.

He may in the process and in the context of his remarks on 26/11 have played to the India gallery with his remarkably forthright take on his country’s widely suspected involvement in the Mumbai outrage of November 2008.

Close to a decade after that incredibly horrendous carnage, the former Prime Minister has bared his angst over Pakistan’s prodding of “non-state actors” ~ nine of whom were gunned down by India’s security forces and the tenth sent to the gallows.

To send “non-state actors” to a neighbouring country to perpetrate an outrage is “unacceptable”, he is reported to have said. Sharif’s was by any reckoning a pregnant statement in an election year. The meeting of the National Security Committee, convened in the immediate aftermath of his comments, may have advanced a feeble defence of an ugly truth by attacking his version as “incorrect and misleading”.

As with a bevy of other issues, the establishment’s response is unlikely to be taken seriously by the comity of nations. The subtext of the former PM’s remarks is pretty obvious. Aside from being a failed state, Pakistan today faces a crisis of credibility.

This is clear from Sharif’s sharp query ~ “Who led Pakistan towards isolation and has brought the country to a stage where the international community is not ready to accept Pakistan’s narrative?” The rift between the PML (N) and the Rawalpindi GHQ has been somewhat exposed with his blunt response to the establishment’s demand that he be tried for treason ~ “The time has come to decide who is a patriot and who is a traitor.” He may have won a reprieve with Thursday’s order of the Lahore High Court, dismissing the Opposition petitions that demanded trial for treason.

Not surprisingly, a beleaguered Sharif’s opponents in the political class have seized the opportunity to make the waters murkier, indeed to brand him as a “traitor”. Significant, therefore, is his strident demand for a National Commission to “find out who is a traitor”.

It would be rather too opportunistic for the Opposition, notably the likes of Imran Khan, to use the comments as an election campaign plank. The point at issue is much too critical for electoral rhetoric. Suffice it to register that Sharif has uttered certain home-truths that are dire, most particularly the punch-line that “We will never allow our land to be used against any other country.”

Perhaps the ISI did just that in November 2008. Pakistan must reflect, just as it must the effort to cow down the newspaper that published Sharif’s interview ~ as is the case around the world, the messenger often pays the price.