Daily Times

The Supreme Court has told Nawaz to go.

Mr Sharif has been here before, of course. He was first removed from the Prime Minister House back in 1993 – on that occasion, too, under charges of graft. Back then it was the President who showed him the door. Fast-forward a few years and he was returned to power, only to be removed once again. Yet this time it is different. There are to be no more comebacks for the comeback kid. For it is Pakistan’s top court that has said, “No more.” Not now. Not for a long time.

It would be difficult to imagine an outcome to Panamagate, which exonerated the Prime Minister and his family entirely. This was due, in large part, to their own mishandling of the crisis.

The ruling party seems to have completely misunderstood the significance of the questions being raised in the Panama investigation, whether by the appropriate judicial authorities or by self-appointed adjudicators on TV and social media. The questions were not just a formality meant to tie them down, nor merely an exercise in legal mudslinging — they were far more. To be more precise, these questions were a direct attack on their legitimacy in large segments of urban Pakistan. In other words, these questions were about who had the moral high ground. And it would be hard to suggest that the ruling party had the moral high ground. In fact, throughout the Panamagate crisis, the ruling party seemed intent on denying itself this — treating the whole affair as yet another political shenanigan by its opponents.

Under such circumstances, where systematic corruption by public officeholders has become a sickeningly common aspect of life for most Pakistanis, it should indeed be heartening to see some form of accountability — some opening of the accounts, as it were.

But the proceedings against the ruling party and the Prime Minister have been, all along, tainted by a problem. And that problem has been the barely concealed haste and unscrupulousness of the hunters — personified by the spectacle of Mr Sheikh Rasheed, his petition and his colourful pronouncements.

The modern legal system is based on the exact opposite of the idea that “the end justifies the means”. Procedural formalism is not just an end in and of itself. It is one of the greatest safeguards to ensure that justice is done across the board.

This applies to Pakistan’s legal system too, except where military dictators have tinkered with it, through for instance, the introduction of articles 62 and 63 to the Constitution. And those hunting the Prime Minister sought to invoke precisely these.

The use of unorthodox structures of investigation such as the JIT, the occurrence of a number of suspicious episodes involving Whatsapp and the overtly politicised attitude of unelected institutions: such things suggest that all other considerations were thrown to the wind — as long as the PM ended up defeated.

Unfortunately, like a lot of countries in the Global South, the discourse around law and justice in urban Pakistan relies heavily on the perception of a constant sense of ‘emergency’ — a situation which requires the use of extraordinary legal and political instruments. And so the argument was successfully made that the federal government and the ruling party would never permit a fair investigation within Parliament or through the usual means of judicial investigation. Special measures were needed, which circumvent the usual procedural, constitutional and political norms — or so we were constantly told.

The imagery of the Sicilian Mafia was deliberately invoked, as was the popular usage of “Godfather” in the media and across drawing rooms in Pakistan. The idea was that the target of investigation — in this case an elected Prime Minister — represented a force so powerful and insidious that normal means of investigation and prosecution were bound to fail, and that extraordinary means were required. We were dealing with a Pakistani version of La Cosa Nostra, we were told.

With such an authoritarian tone to the discussion, is it a surprise, then, that it all ended with the invocation of a gift from the worst dictator in Pakistani history?

The real tests of Pakistan’s democracy still await us. It would be important to be mindful that this is simply one single case — a precedent, admittedly of momentous proportions. But what happens when the book is thrown at our three-time prime minister? Will the courts go after other leaders who have also indulged in malpractices and dubious financial transactions? Will it go after everyone – even those who have proved until now to be well and truly above the law? *

Published in Daily Times, July 29^th , 2017.