Shahbaz Sharif’s
belated awakening
Punjab Chief
Minister Shahbaz Sharif has belatedly woken up to the perils of partisan,
politically motivated accountability. This ‘awakening’ has only occurred after
the Sharifs have had this kind of process visited on them of late. Starting
with the Panama case that set in motion the disqualification and elimination
from the electoral field of elder brother and former prime minister Nawaz
Sharif and currently winding its way through the thicket of cases under
investigation by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) or in the
anti-corruption courts, the accountability process once again is focused
primarily on the incumbent PML-N and in particular the Sharif family. Addressing
this phenomenon, Shahbaz Sharif used the occasion of a welfare ceremony in Lahore
on May 1, 2018 to dilate on the fact that NAB seemed to be working proactively
in Punjab and the Supreme Court too was engaged in taking ‘notice’ of
everything with great attention. While in principle welcoming the scrutiny,
Shahbaz Sharif defended his record in office over the last decade and presented
himself for full accountability if even a single penny’s corruption could be
proved against him. He called into question the ‘holier than thou’ attitude of
those who had loans worth billions waived and were drenched in corruption but
were pointing fingers of accusation at others and advising the country on
honesty. He in turn advised the state institutions to give attention to the
recovery of looted money. Double standards would not work, he cautioned, water
and fire cannot combine and if these institutions had taken on the
responsibility to eliminate corruption, then this should be carried out without
discrimination.
There is no
denying the track record of partisan accountability in our history. Successive
governments have used accountability as a weapon to do down their political
rivals. PML-N governments are also included in this list of suspects. No one can
forget the Ehtesab Bureau and its chief, Saif-ur-Rehman’s efforts against the
PPP in the late 1990s. The chief ‘prosecutor’ of these cases against Benazir
Bhutto and Asif Zardari himself wept on television many years later while
confessing to his shenanigans. A similar pattern persists to date. That is not
to say that there were not grounds for proceeding against one party or the
other (and state officials) suspected of wrongdoing when in power. Only that
the dreadful pattern shows incumbents virtually exclusively tilting against
rivals no longer in power to try and knock them out of the political race. Now
that the shoe is on the other foot, naturally the PML-N is railing against
being targeted in this manner. What Shahbaz Sharif and other PML-N leaders
under the accountability cosh are perhaps forgetting is their own role in the
distant and recent past along these lines. It may be recalled that while in
exile, Nawaz Sharif and the late Benazir Bhutto signed a Charter of Democracy
in London vowing to, amongst other things, eschew such underhanded tactics in
future. Implied in that Charter was a commitment to creating an objective,
fair, non-partisan accountability process. As usual, in the hurly-burly of the
re-entry into electoral politics upon return from exile and after Benazir
Bhutto’s assassination, all those pious intentions were forgotten and the country
saw the PML-N in opposition joining hands with the judiciary and establishment
against the PPP and after coming into power going to further lengths in this
regard. The inherent flaw in this kind of partisan, politically motivated
accountability is that even genuine cases cannot be brought to closure without
charges of victimisation being bandied about by those on the receiving end and
gaining traction in the public mind. If the PML-N is by now worried about what
is in store for it at the hands of a proactive judiciary, allegedly with the
full support of the establishment, this may not be a bad moment to reflect on
accountability regimes (the present one is a legacy of Musharraf, which Nawaz
Sharif of late has lamented not doing away with when he had the chance) that
can temporarily be used against rivals for political purposes but have a
disconcerting habit of returning time and again to hoist their authors with
their own petard.
No comments:
Post a Comment