Shehbaz Sharif, Pakistan’s new prime minister, takes oath

KARACHI, Pakistan (AA) – Pakistan’s parliament on Monday elected Shehbaz Sharif, the three-time chief minister of the key province of Punjab, as the country’s new prime minister.

Shehbaz, the younger brother of three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, took oath of the office later in the evening.

He grabbed the office following a successful no-confidence vote in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, against his predecessor, Imran Khan, on Sunday.

The 70-year-old cancer survivor was pivotal in the opposition’s push to topple Khan’s government.

Born on Sept. 23, 1951, to a Punjabi-speaking Kashmiri family in the northeastern city of Lahore, the capital of Punjab, Shehbaz is known as a “tough administrator” who according to some analysts knows the “art to govern.”

“He is not a genius but extremely hard-working,” said Taseer Mustafa, a Lahore-based journalist who has worked as Shehbaz’s media adviser.

“He covers the gap (of not being a genius) through his hard work,” Mustafa told Anadolu Agency.

Early life

The Sharif family, which hails from the Anantnag district of Indian-administered Kashmir, settled in the city of Amritsar in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab in the early 20th century. They migrated to Lahore in 1947 following the creation of Pakistan and India as two independent states.

The family’s sprawling residence located on the northern outskirts of Lahore is named after their ancestral village “Jati Umra” in Amritsar.

Shehbaz’s father, Mohammad Sharif, an upper middle class industrialist, started a steel business and set up a small factory on the outskirts of Lahore.

Shehbaz, the second of Sharif’s three sons, got his early education from Saint Anthony’s High School in Lahore and later attended the prestigious Government College University in the same city to earn a degree of bachelor of arts.

Along with his elder brother Nawaz, Shehbaz joined his family business in the early 1970s.

Their factories were taken into state control under a controversial nationalization policy of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1974 but were returned in 1977 following the ouster of the Bhutto government through a military coup by then Army Chief Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

A father of four — two sons and two daughters — Shehbaz married three times. Currently, he has two wives.

All of his children are from his first wife, Nusrat Shehbaz, whom he married in 1973.

His eldest son and political heir, Hamza Shahbaz, is currently serving as the opposition leader in the Punjab Assembly and is the candidate for the chief minister’s office amid a political crisis in the province.

Political journey

The Sharif family entered politics in the early 1980s, when the country was run under martial law.

Nawaz was the first in the family to venture into politics and joined the provincial Cabinet as the youngest finance minister under the patronage of then Punjab Governor Gen. Ghulam Jilani.

Political opponents sarcastically call the Sharifs the “product of martial law and Gen. Jilani.”

Shehbaz was elected to the Punjab Assembly in 1988 and to the National Assembly in 1990.

He was again elected to the Punjab Assembly in 1993 and served as the opposition leader until 1996.

He was elected as chief minister for the first time in 1997, but his government lasted slightly over two years as then Army Chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf toppled the Nawaz Sharif government in a bloodless military coup in October 1999.

The Sharif brothers were tried for hijacking a commercial airliner. Nawaz was sentenced to life imprisonment in April 2000 for issuing orders, which he later rescinded, telling ground control to refuse landing permission to a Karachi-bound airliner, sending it out of the country. Among those on the plane was Gen. Musharraf, who came to power that day in a coup.

Shehbaz and two other accused were acquitted.

In 2001, the Sharif family, under an agreement brokered by former Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, went into exile in Saudi Arabia and lived there for six years.

The family returned to Pakistan in 2007, and Shehbaz got elected as Punjab chief minister for a second term in the 2008 general elections and completed his five-year term in 2013.

In 2013, he was re-elected as chief minister for a third term and served until 2018.

In 2018, he was elected as a member of the National Assembly and served as the opposition leader until April 11 this year.

He was chosen as the president of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz group) in 2017 following the disqualification of Nawaz by the Supreme Court in the wake of the 2016 Panama Papers scandal.

As the chief minister of Punjab, he developed a reputation as an efficient administrator, particularly for his grip over bureaucracy.

“He knows how to treat the bureaucracy and how to run the government,” Salman Ghani, a Lahore-based senior political analyst, told Anadolu Agency.

Corruption charges

Shehbaz is viewed as the pioneer of today’s Lahore, one of Pakistan’s developed cities.

He is particularly admired for the development of the communication and transportation system across the province, including in small and rural areas.

“He is politically experienced and well aware of statecraft, in addition to a good track record of governance,” Ghani said.

“We don’t expect a miracle as far as the economy is concerned, but he would certainly make a difference in terms of governance, which was the weakest point of Imran Khan’s government,” he maintained.

The Sharifs have often been accused of corruption. Together with Nawaz, Shehbaz and his two sons have been facing several corruption cases.

The rise of their businesses during their stints raised eyebrows. They, however, deny the charges and term the cases “political victimization.”

Shehbaz, who served prison time for nearly two years during the previous government, has been on bail.

The higher courts rebuked the anti-corruption authorities while granting bail to Shehbaz in two cases.

The UK’s National Crime Agency recently cleared him in a money laundering probe initiated at the request of the previous government.