Apart from leaving behind an economy in tatters and fractured foreign relations with the US and EU, the PTI also leaves a legacy of failing spectacularly in addressing institutional corruption by making a complete farce of the accountability process. For the better part of his three-and-a-half-year tenure, former PM Imran Khan remained fixated on persecuting opposition parties’ leaders, building weak corruption cases against them that only ensured unnecessary stints of incarceration rather than convictions based on proof of white-collar crime. If reports of an inquiry initiated by the FIA against former PM Imran Khan for allegedly selling an expensive necklace after depositing a fraction of the actual cost in the Toshakhana are to be believed then it seems the new coalition government is headed down the same road of vengeful accountability as the PTI did as the case reeks of typical witch-hunt and media-trial features. Separately, placing key aides to former PM Imran Khan on FIA’s no-fly list without solid grounds to do so also indicates similar desperation and that these actions are driven by vengeance. Expectedly, the IHC directed the DG FIA to remove the names from the no-fly list.
Throughout PTI’s ‘accountability’ campaign against opposition parties, those who suffered obscene levels of harassment and the mental anguish that it brought, were also the voices of reason, proposing logical amendments to laws such as the NAB ordinance while also strongly opposing new ones from being passed that would give institutions unbridled powers of arrest without cause or investigation. It is the duty of those very people, now that they are in power and will be running important ministries, that the accountability reforms they spoke of be carried out. If they rather opt to use the same laws against the PTI to settle scores, they will be condoning a dangerous and regressive practice of filling up jails with opposition politicians over flimsy charges that do not hold up in court for too long due to absence of evidence. Former PM and senior PML-N leader Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, no stranger to NAB’s atrocities under the PTI, has advised the new government to dissolve the accountability watchdog. This is perhaps an aggressive approach to the problem; a less severe and welcome step in the right direction would be to make NAB ordinance 1999 less open-ended, arbitrary and draconian in nature. Simultaneously, corruption cases, if any, should be well-prepared so that convictions are made on the basis of tangible evidence.
