After being hounded by the NAB, threatened with arrest and fearing that his reputation would be tarnished through a media trial, former member of the Capital Development Authority Brigadier (retd) Asad Munir committed suicide in 2019, succumbing to the mental pressure caused by the accountability watchdog’s high handedness. Yesterday, three years after his death, the deceased was acquitted of all allegations, with the case ruled as ‘not fit for trial’ and lacking ‘any shred of evidence to prove that the accused committed any wrongdoing’. Similar acquittals in NAB cases have been witnessed more recently as well. Sixteen persons, including a PML(N) MPA, who were made part of a reference in the Saaf Pani corruption case filed by NAB in 2018, were found not guilty of any alleged financial malfeasance or procedural irregularities. Separately, Mir Shakil Ur Rehman, who was arrested and kept behind bars for eight months in relation to a 34-year-old property transaction dispute case was also acquitted, with the court commenting that pursuing the case further would be a “futile exercise” due to a lack of evidence presented by NAB.
An accountability system where a case can evidently be created out of thin air by an institution that has a reputation of dragging individuals through the mud out of pure vindictiveness, forcing one to take his own life, should be a source of shame for those responsible in creating and using it to advance their personal agendas. The responsibility here does not only lie with the current government and establishment but rather all those past regimes that chose to use the NAB as a tool against their political opponents, and in some case even to settle personal scores, rather than take the necessary measures to rationalize and bring some sanity to a law that is far too arbitrary, open-ended, draconian and contains too many internal inconsistencies. A dialing down of tensions and the resultant fierce rivalry between the opposition and government is required to reach any consensus over how to reform the accountability process. Short of this, no meaningful legislation can be passed.
