Daily Times

Tomorrow is expected to be an eventful day. But the agony is not going to end with the anticipated guilty verdict. There are two more stages — appeals to the High Court (HC) and then to the Supreme Court (SC) — before the nation could finally draw the curtain on this painful experience.

The hearing of the case had started on January 4, 2017 with Justice Khosa leading the bench comprising Justice Azmat Saeed, Justice Ijaz Afzal, Justice Gulzar Ahmed and Justice Ijaz-ul-Hasan.

This bench was formed by Chief Justice (CJ) Saqib Nisar on December 31, 2016 after the earlier bench had stood dissolved following the retirement of CJ Anwar Zaheer Jamali.

The case has so far lasted for approximately 650 painful days.

There are four significant dates in this agonising tale, which if read in the right sequence and with an eye for spotting the devil in the details is likely to lead one to the hand holding the smoking gun. These are; firstly, on August 29, 2016 the SC of Pakistan turned down a petition from Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan to disqualify then prime minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif over the Panama Papers leaks, saying the petitioner has not approached any other appropriate forum available. Secondly, on October 6, 2016 Dawn published Cyril Almeida’s highly ‘controversial’ story (Exclusive: Act against militants or face international isolation, civilians tell military). Later in the evening on the same day (October 6, 2016) Imran, who was enjoying the cool heights of Nathiagali, announced, out of the blue, seemingly without any immediate provocation, that he would lock-down the Capital on October 30, 2016. The PTI Chief invited people to join him in this endeavour, which he called his campaign to break the “Nawaz-Zardari corruption nexus”.

Isn’t it strange that the very court that had dismissed on merit an earlier plea for hearing the case, suddenly realised that the case in question actually merits a hearing by the top court and constitutes a five-member bench?

On October 28, 2016 the then CJ Anwar Zaheer Jamali formeda five-member bench to hear the Panama Papers case against former Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif.

So, the very court that had dismissed on merit an earlier plea for hearing the case suddenly realized that the case in question actually merits hearing by the top court and constitutes a five-member bench to start hearing the case from November 1, 2016.

What had happened between August 29, and October 28 (other than Cyril’s Dawn story on October 6)which changed the SC’s mind? Of course, the obvious reason could be Imran’s threat to lock-down Islamabad on October 30.

In trying to ward off the looming threat to his government from the known ‘unknowns’ following the publication of Dawn’s story the then PM sacrificed first his Information Minister Pervaiz Rashid, followed by then Principal Information Officer (PIO) of the government of Pakistan, Rao Tehsin and finally the then PM’s Special Assistant on Foreign Affairs Tariq Fatmi. But to no avail.

The rest is history which is still in the making.

The battle lines were drawn promptly and the first blow was dealt openly and in full public view without any qualms about being identified as the spoiler when the Senate elections were blatantly rigged from start to finish —a finish which saw the majority in the upper house engineered into losing the offices of both the Chairman and the Deputy Chairman — the first to the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP), an obscure political party created out of thin air only days before the Senate elections reducing the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s (PML-N’s) majority to less than minority in the Balochisan Provincial Assembly and the second to the PPP.

This was achieved by arranging a nexus between two unlikely friends—Imran and Zardari. One recalls that it was to break Zardari’s nexus with Nawaz in corruption Imran had vowed on October 6, 2016, that he would lock down Islamabad.

There seems to be no let-up in the election engineering process. One cannot rule out the possibility that even if the PML-N were to win a two-thirds majority on July 25 it would not to be allowed to form the government at the centre or in the Punjab.

But one recalls that the all- powerful ex-military dictator, Pervez Musharraf with all his subtle and non-subtle political weapons could not manage to get the hand-made PML-Q to win the 2002 general elections. He had to buy about a dozen or so PPP MNAs to get his candidate Zafarullah Khan Jamali elected to the office of the leader of the house, but that too by a majority of just one vote!

Elections to the lower house are usually a totally different cup of tea from the upper house polls. In the Senate elections you need to buy a score or two MPAs to tilt the scales in your favour.

But when you are dealing with a multitude comprising hundreds of thousands of voters, in the first place you simply cannot hope to buy all of them and secondly even if you can you would not have the money to buy out the entire multitude.

The engineers have so far succeeded in transferring a good number of the so-called ‘electables’ from the PMLN and the PPP to the PTI. But what about the voters? Do they go along with the ‘electables’? Normally they do. But there is no guarantee that they would do that every time the ‘electables’ change their party loyalties. There is this possibility that many of the voters may prefer to stick to the party they had voted for in the previous elections. In fact, why would anyone who did not vote for the PTI in 2013, vote for it now when its popularity wave seems to have turned into a damp squib?

Recalling the 2002 elections once again, although Musharraf had succeeded in creating a PML-Q out of PML-N’s electables. But he could not transfer all the votes from the PML-N to PML-Q. That is perhaps why the PML-Q fell short by a substantial number of seats which made it impossible for it to form the government then without the help of the Patriots.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Islamabad. He served as the Executive Editor of Express Tribune until 2014

Published in Daily Times, July 5^th 2018.