One game CPEC is not changing

Islamabad diary

That is the Panama leaks, the bone stuck in the gullet, the gathering nightmare all the hoarse talk of the CPEC being a mighty game-changer is not changing. You can see this from their drawn faces, their worried looks.

They know they have to come up with credible answers. Fairy tales, of which their expertise is vast, just would not do because the forum this time is different. And there is no room for what they love the most and which has served them in such good stead over the years: friendly prosecution.

But since the right answers are in short supply the PML-N leadership which is at the centre of this scandal is raising other, distracting issues and slogans: the CPEC, conspiracies against the CPEC, development and progress being sabotaged by the enemies of the CPEC. To their dismay and chagrin none of these ploys is working.

The embattled prime minister cuts a ribbon here, addresses a public meeting there, goes to Gwadar, belts out a few more clichés about game-changing CPEC and the sweeping vistas of development it is set to open, but the nightmare refuses to go away. The questions are insistent and their lordships of the apex court, finally seized of this matter, have their eyes right on the ball.

Who owns the famous London flats? Where did the money for them come from? The money trail, the phrase everyone is using…what is the money trail?

Not just the brazenness but the audacity of the performers has to be admired. Every newspaper-reading person in the broad spaces of the Islamic Republic – Fortress of Islam, no less – knows that the famous flats have been in the use of the Sharif family since the early 1990s.

There is a Tim Sebastian interview of Hasan Nawaz right after the Musharraf coup in which this scholar – Hasan was then supposedly studying in London, although any hint of scholarship is hard to make out from his eloquent discourse – in which Tim asks questions about the flats. And Hasan says the flat he is in is on a “rent basis” and the money for the rent comes from Pakistan.

There’s nothing secret about these details which are public knowledge and have been known for years. Yet with a straight face these facts are denied or twisted. 

The chutzpah – another name for brazenness – has to be admired.

The Al Tawfeek loan goes back to 1999. The Sharifs took a loan from this investment bank…in the PM’s second incarnation as PM, and then they defaulted, paying none of the money back, clearly thinking that this was Pakistan where loan default was then, and perhaps still is, an honourable pastime, a sure mark of one’s clout and authority.

Unfortunately for the Sharifs the bankers were not foolish enough to test the frontiers of Pakistani jurisprudence. They went to the London courts instead where the high court, no less, passed an injunction against the Sharifs that unless the money was returned the collateral for the loan – the flats – would be in jeopardy. Insiders maintain that the loan was paid back by a benefactor, name unknown, from the Holy Land.

Again all this is on record. Yet our repositories of the truth continue to put their faith in befooling all and sundry. The word Al Tawfeek never comes on their lips. In any other country claiming to be a democracy and one not a certified banana republic, such a trail of distortion would lead straight to grave penalties, including disqualification from public office. But here, as we can see, different standards prevail. Asif Ali Zardari got away with his Swiss funds and the Sharifs were put no tough questions about the trail to their London havens…until now, that is.

The Panama leaks were a visitation from the skies. When the scandal first broke the truth escaped even President Mamnoon Hussain’s sealed lips. He said it was a sign from heaven which coming from him amounted to a startling admission.

Recall that Ghous Ali Shah and Sartaj Aziz were also presidential candidates but Mamnoon Hussain was preferred because he was more his master’s voice than the other two eminences. So if even his tongue slipped it tells you something of the scandal’s impact.     

And now events have conspired to bring this scandal from the political arena into the high-ceilinged chamber where sits Court No 1 headed by My Lord the Chief Justice.

From personal experience I know that when you face criminal proceedings – and I have faced one or two in my time – or there is a court case with possible serious consequences all other things are driven from your mind. You can concentrate on nothing else. This is the last thing on your mind when you go to sleep and the first thing before your eyes in the mornings. The Sharif family may be mouthing the words CPEC and conspiracy but on their minds is only one thing: Panama leaks and the skeletons emerging from those ghostly cupboards.

The delaying tactics and the evasions having not worked, the matter is before the apex court and how it turns out there only the angels know.

Some related thoughts arise. The Charter of Democracy – how grand and uplifting it sounded when first put together – was, in essence, a mutual defence pact between the PML-N and the PPP: each vowing to see and hear no evil about the other, that Magna Carta amounting to nothing more than that. And the chumps of this republic, the extended ranks of the liberati, called this pantomime democracy and loudly proclaimed that prime piece of nonsense that the cure for the ills of democracy was more democracy. Say this to our Swiss and London beneficiaries and the mountains will echo with their loud peals of laughter.

The democracy we have, the post-1990 democracy, emerged from the womb of the Zia dictatorship and its greatest gift has been loot and plunder. Military dictators have robbed and looted too. But the scale of democratic plunder outweighs anything done by those heroes. What this reveals is a crisis of leadership, a crisis of Pakistan’s governing classes. Politicians, generals, mandarins, businessmen and industrialists, and now even the media, are of these same classes, all equally indicted at the bar of history.

So spare a thought for the soldier, the non-commissioned officer, the subedar, the lieutenant, captain and major, deployed on the frontlines and risking his life. For what, might he not ask? For the benefit of the loot-and-plunder classes?

I have said this before, let me say it again: there is not a village graveyard in Chakwal without its share of those who have died in Zarb-e-Azb and its related operations. Did these martyrs die for Swiss beneficiaries, offshore account holders and London property magnates?

This is a momentous moment in the nation’s history. Which way will the winds of November blow? More than the bare bones of legality hang on the answer to this question.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com