Disorder
threatens
The allegedly
humiliating manner in which civil servant Ahad Cheema was arrested and exposed
before the media behind bars by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has
got the entire Pakistan Administrative Services (PAS) up in arms. Seething with
resentment at the treatment of their colleague, the PAS officers took the
unprecedented step of summoning their colleagues from near and far throughout
Punjab to hold a meeting and decide on their response. It turned out after the
meeting that the PAS was divided on the best way forward. Three options were
discussed without a conclusion: confronting NAB, continuing with their (partial)
pen down strike or taking legal recourse. Although the offices locked by angry
bureaucrats were later reportedly opened, even the partial strike caused
paralysis and public inconvenience. The PAS is continuing its deliberations on
which option is the best for them. Meanwhile the Punjab government has decided
to approach the federal government to get its support to rein in NAB, a federal
institution, and persuade or compel it to adhere to legal procedures and norms
and not to humiliate civil servants. Needless to say the Punjab opposition,
mainly the PTI, railed against the PAS for its protest and lock out. While no
one can oppose accountability across the board, NAB since its new chairman
Justice (retd) Javed Iqbal took over, seems in a hurry to wipe out the memory
of his predecessor’s alleged foot dragging in cases against the Sharifs, going
so far as to treat civil servants as alleged collaborators or front men of
Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif. Whether there is any truth in this
perception or not only proper investigation would reveal, but hasty and
seemingly arbitrary actions have set the PAS against such treatment and
threatened the Punjab administration with disruption if not paralysis. Surely
there must be a better, more legally defensible way to achieve NAB’s objectives
without throwing Punjab into administrative turmoil.
Of course this
targeting of the PAS by NAB can only be seen in the backdrop of what the
Sharifs are undergoing at the hands of the judiciary. Ousted prime minister
Nawaz Sharif has intelligently used the victim card to great effect, if the
size of the public rallies he has been addressing since his departure from
office is any guide. Having been disqualified from the prime ministership and
then disallowed to head the PML-N by the Supreme Court (SC), Nawaz Sharif is
now preparing his party and supporters for the real possibility that he will be
disqualified for life by the SC in the third verdict in his case expected any
day now. The two verdicts so far, disqualification and being disallowed to be
party head, Nawaz Sharif has described as ‘pre-poll rigging’, not the least
because the SC second verdict’s short order declared the judgement would apply
with retrospective effect. Normally the courts accept the balance of
convenience in pronouncing verdicts with prospective effect, thereby giving
protection to acts already done in good faith. One result of the retrospective
verdict has been the rejection of all the PML-N candidates’ papers signed by
Nawaz Sharif as (then) party head. After the Election Commission of Pakistan
(ECP) turned down the option of those candidates’ nomination forms being signed
by PML-N Chairman Raja Zafarul Haq and instead allowed the candidates to stand
as independents (a decision that is considered controversial in some quarters),
fears are being expressed that this may open the floodgates to horse-trading,
of which rumours and allegations are already doing the rounds. Consciously or
otherwise, the campaign by the powers-that-be to tighten the noose around Nawaz
Sharif and his family runs the risk of unleashing disorder and institutional
conflict that may give birth to disorder and worse. Surely that is not an
outcome anyone in their senses would consider good for democracy or the
country.
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