Daily Times

You couldn’t tell from Daily Mail reporter David Rose’s twitter boasts, egged on by the selected prime minister’s team of planted advisors, that the story implicating Shahbaz Sharif and his son in law in corruption, money laundering and embezzlement was sent to press based on evidence that was “pretty limited and based on assumptions,” could you? Yet that is exactly what the newspaper’s lawyers were forced to say at the London High Court, which ruled that the article carried the highest level of defamatory meaning for both Shahbaz Sharif and his son in law. It turns out that all David Rose was counting on when he put two and two together for his piece was that the PML-N president “lives in a palace” in Lahore, and since he was chief minister when a lot of earthquake aid came from Great Britain, he must have got his hands dirty somehow. It goes without saying, of course, that if palace-like homes were to be automatically accepted as proof of corruption, then the man sitting atop the palace in Bani Gala would have been judged, convicted and condemned a long time ago. Still, even those of us with only a passing understanding of the international press know that no editor in the UK would ever send a story to print based on such assumptions, so he must have had something else to go on. And indeed he did. Now people will begin to understand the implied meaning of the picture that PML-N has been showing the press ever since last summer when the article in question appeared, which clearly showed Rose sitting obediently before the selected prime minister and his advisor for accountability, whose only job is to malign anybody who’s been in government before even if there is no evidence to back any of his claims. And the argument that the Sun presented in the London Court, that the government of Pakistan was investigating Sharif for the charges laid out in the story, only played against it and strengthened the stand taken by the PML-N president.

Still, even those of us with only a passing understanding of the international press know that no editor in the UK would ever send a story to print based on such assumptions, so he must have had something else to go on

The judge was forced to note that the Sun story caused clear injury to Sharif’s reputation, and led people in both Pakistan and UK to believe, not consider, that he stole money through back channels and kickbacks. This is, needless to say, a very harsh indictment of the selected government’s so called accountability drive. And it’s understandable why both Shahzad Akbar, the selected PM’s aide on accountability, and David Rose the journalist are running around like headless chicken and pointing out that what has come out so far was only from a preliminary hearing, and the trial is yet to come.Perhaps the realisation has yet to sink in that preliminary hearings set the stage for trials because they ascertain the quality and integrity of the evidence that they are going to be based on. And since this round has gone clearly to Shahbaz Sharif and the Sun is going into this trial on only the world of the Pakistani government, it will soon come to light that this was a planted story to begin with.The same questions that Sharif’s lawyer presented to the court in London will be repeated at the trial. Whose money has been stolen? Who was victimised and where is the proof? Where is the stolen money? Where is the evidence? Where is the evidence of kickbacks and misappropriation? Remember all this has come from the London High Court, which sets the standard in the integrity of justice delivery globally, so the selected government will not be able to wriggle out of it too easily. This, in fact, is just the beginning. Now that Shahbaz Sharif is well on the road to being exonerated and the government’s accountability witch hunt is finally being exposed, people will soon be able to see for themselves that the opposition’s claims of political victimisation were correct. If everybody who has held power before Imran Khan was really corrupt, then the government would have been able to extract some allegedly stolen money from them after incarcerating and harassing so many of them for so long. Yet so far it has drawn a complete blank.No doubt people remember how the likes of Shahzad Akbar and David Rose poked fun at Shahbaz Sharif and dared him to take the Sun to court if he had nothing to hide. And now that he’s done just that, had his day in court, and come out on top, there is only more egg on the reporter’s, the accountability advisor’s and the selected PM’s faces. All this government has done in two-and-a-half years is brutally victimise opposition politicians, run the economy into the ground and make life miserable for the common man, and spoil Pakistan’s relations with some of its most crucial allies internationally. All the while it has tried to keep people’s attention diverted by spinning an imaginary story about how he has come to bring back their stolen wealth and transform Pakistan into the envy of the world overnight. But you just can’t fool all the people all the time, can you, especially when a respected judicial body like the London High Court exposes you for what you are? The government should come clean immediately, to gain the trust of the people if for nothing else, and admit that it persecuted opposition politicians without any proof. It must also release all those locked up just out of political hatred at once.

The writer is an entrepreneur and one of the youngest female members of the Punjab Assembly. She tweets @hinaparvezbutt