The Guardian terms Nawaz Sharif as ‘coward Sharif’

Rating Justification

The iVerify Pakistan team has checked this content and has established that it is false.

To arrive at this verdict, the iVerify Pakistan team checked the article published by British publication The Guardian on January 31, 2024.

HOW IT STARTED

On February 1, 2024, a post by journalist Maleeha Hashmey on social media platform X said: “The English magazine The Guardian labelled Nawaz Sharif with the nickname ‘Buzdil (coward) Sharif’.”

The post gained over 210,000 views and was shared 7,200 times.

Bol News journalist Muhammad Usama Ghazi also shared the same claim, in both English and Urdu. However, his post used both “cowed Sharif” and “Buzdil Sharif”.

The post was viewed over 6,800 times.

The same post was shared here.

METHODOLOGY

The iVerify Pakistan team sought to determine the veracity of the claim due to the public’s keen interest in foreign media coverage of the country’s political honchos.

Furthermore, Ghazi used both “cowed” and “buzdil” in his post which have different meanings.

To verify which word was used by the British publication, the team did a keyword search for “cowed Sharif” and “Nawaz Sharif” which yielded the following Jan 31 analysis piece from The Guardian titled: “Pakistani military use age-old tactics to keep Imran Khan away from election”.

The piece’s fourth paragraph is reproduced below:

“Now the tables have turned again. [Imran] Khan has become the military’s harshest critic, confined behind bars, while a cowed Sharif has reconciled with the army generals and his path back to power has been cleared. As allegations of pre-poll rigging have abounded, Sharif is expected to be all but escorted into an election win.”

As can be seen, the word used for Nawaz was “cowed”, instead of coward.

As per Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries:

Cow as a verb means: “to frighten somebody in order to make them obey you” with its synonym being “intimidate”.

Cower means: “to bend low and/or move backwards because you are frightened.”

Cowed means: “​made to feel afraid and that you are not as good as somebody else.”

Meanwhile, coward is defined as “a person who is not brave or who does not have the courage to do things that other people do not think are especially difficult.”

Notably, cowed is an adjective while coward is a noun.

The iVerify team next consulted The Oxford English-Urdu Dictionary to check how it translated “cowed” and “coward’ in Urdu.

As can be seen, cow as a transitive verb was translated as: to threaten, to spread fear or break someone’s spirit.

Meanwhile, coward was translated as buzdil or a person prone to being afraid.

Farhan Muhammad Khan, Dawn Urdu‘s digital managing editor, said “cowed” was not a “familiar and commonly used” word which might explain why those who read it in the analysis piece “did not understand it properly and read it as coward”.

He said a coward (buzdil) was someone “who worries or cannot make a decision” while cowed was when “a person remains under someone’s pressure or takes decisions under someone’s pressure.”

BACKGROUND OF NAWAZ SHARIF:

According to Dawn.com, Nawaz left for London on November 19, 2019, after being diagnosed with an immune system disorder.

The PML-N supremo returned to Pakistan on October 21, 2023, ending his four-year exile in the UK.

Nawaz was a proclaimed offender in the Avenfield, Al-Azizia, and Toshakhana cases with convictions in the first two as well. He has since been acquitted in the first two cases and secured bail in the third.

He has since been accused by his political opponents that he returned because he made a successful deal with the military establishment and toned down his rhetoric against former generals.

CONCLUSION

The iVerify Pakistan team has determined that the claim circulating on social media is false as the word “cowed” does not have the same meaning as coward and is not translated as buzdil in Urdu.

Analysing the various definitions associated with the word and its forms, as well as the meaning for coward, shows its relevant applicability in The Guardian‘s piece over buzdil/coward.

Evidence and References

January 31, 2024, The Guardian analysis piece:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/31/imran-khan-pakistan-election-tactics-military

Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries definition of cow as a verb:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/cow_2

Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries definition of cower:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/cower?q=cower

Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries definition of cowed:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/cower?q=cowed

Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries definition of coward:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/cower?q=coward