Dilemma of a de jure PM

Judgments are not made on the basis of fictional notions, nor should matters of law be decided either by someone’s honourable whims or under public pressure or due to an obsession with the sort of ratings the idiot box is so crazy about. Laws are heartless. So the facts of the matter need to be treated as they are whether you like them or not. Historic judgments are rare and so are exceptionally brilliant judges.

The judgment in the Panama leaks case is so open-ended that it is being used by everyone as it suits them. The comedy is that everybody is claiming victory while there is nothing to rejoice for any of the contesting parties. The plaintiffs – Messrs Imran Khan/Israrul Haq/Sheikh Rasheed – are ridiculous in all their celebrating having lost on all groundless pleas. The defendants are finding it hard to tragically celebrate their narrow escape as they have been kept in the dock.

Everybody is reading his/her own meaning in a judgment that has in fact taken the case back to square one. What does the author of The Godfather say about the failure of the jury in unearthing an undetectable crime? Indeed, the origin of all primitive accumulation is criminal. But how does this universal truth about the origin of capital grant you the licence to convict anyone in the absence of incriminating evidence? When will we stop chasing the ghosts of the past while ignoring the ongoing plunder of the national wealth and all-round rent-seeking by almost all who matter? No sacred cows please.

The learned attorneys of the defence showed great skill in taking the apex court into the wilderness of the graveyard of the money-trail. However, the 13 points that have been raised by their Lordships in their order are hard to be investigated, especially by professional soldiers. Almost all the questions are related to the businesses-in-exile of the late Mian Mohammed Sharif, the father of the prime minister and one of the most flourishing entrepreneurs of Pakistan with two grandsons at the receiving end of the money trail who now feed their father from their overseas sprawling businesses.

In a way, the House of Sharif – after having been bitten twice and losing all fortunes – found it convenient to keep some of their businesses outside the country and a fraction of their wealth in safe havens. And the successors are now finding it difficult to explain four decades of some of the informal businesses the elder Sharif ran during his two stints in exile.

In an environment of deep suspicions about the rise of the House of Sharif, their no less astonishing revival and their becoming a model of a quick rise to economic and political power, it is easy to cast aspersions on their remarkable expertise in wheeling and dealing. They dare say: come and get us and they go scot-free. An overwhelming suspicion has been created that the penchant of the Sharifs for big-ticket projects is allegedly driven by their lust for huge ‘kickbacks’. But so far during this tenure not a single case of corruption has surfaced, even though there has been lot of noise on television screens by somewhat sponsored noisemakers.

The Panama leaks were a sudden bolt from the sky for the prime minister and his sons who are well settled in London and are not liable to file their tax returns in Pakistan. The specific question being asked from the prime minister is about the generous money he is getting as a gift from his son, Husain, since his (the PM’s) name is nowhere found in the Panama papers.

The prime minister faces a dilemma: if he continues in office, he will be accused of influencing the investigations to be conducted by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), and keeping office under a moral burden. If he resigns, he is sure to embrace high moral ground, but that may destabilise his government and the party. In my view, the best course for the PM is to resign and snatch the moral offensive of his opposition and clear his name during the course of the investigation. The best option for him is to come up with supporting evidence and help conclude the inquiry within the two-month limit set by the Supreme Court. That will allow him the time to push his unfinished agenda through the fag end of his tenure. It will also help him take the winds out of the balloon of the opposition, Imran Khan in particular.

As in his past two half-tenures, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has again faced serious challenges to his government. There were forces that wanted to keep him under pressure and contain his sovereign authority. His first challenge came from PTI chief Imran Khan who questioned the very authenticity of the last general elections. For two years, from street agitation to the longest dharna in our history to court battles, Imran kept the Sharif government on tenterhooks. The situation became so ugly that military intervention could have become visible when the PM House was about to be ransacked by sponsored agitators. It was the united will of all the parliamentary parties, except the PTI, and the joint session of parliament that frustrated the putsch.

After a brief soothing period came the scandal of the Panama leaks, which included the names of the two sons of the prime minister as beneficial owners of offshore companies, indicating a link with the luxury flats in London owned by the two brothers. That opened a Pandora’s Box and put the prime minister in a rather unenviable position. Quite narrowly, the PM survived two half-baked attempts by the powers that be and almost lost control of foreign and security policies.

The question that arises is: why have most of the elected prime ministers – from Liaquat Ali Khan’s murder and removal of the two stalwarts of the Pakistan movement, Khawaja Nazimuddin and Husain Shaheed Suhrawardy, to Bhutto’s judicial murder and the dismissals of two each governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif – had to face such a terrible and ignominious end? The answer is obvious: in a ‘state of martial rule’, the civilian leadership suffered and almost every prime minister was dubbed a security risk. No doubt the mistakes of, and rivalry among, politicians helped Bonapartists to either stage coups or render the elected governments rudderless.

Even if the army remained out of power, it exercised its authority beyond its constitutional mandate and liked to exhibit its autonomy to reinforce the diarchy of the power structure. Indeed, this overlapping of military structures is a hangover of successive military regimes and, hopefully, will recede into its fold with the consolidation of a still fragile democratic transition. For Sharif, it’s again a make or break moment.

The writer is a senior journalist.

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