What goes around, comes around. As was predicted by this paper and many others, the new government has started using the state’s anti-corruption apparatus, NAB in particular, against the opposition. The aforementioned predictions were always accompanied by pleas to the then government to stop their hamfisted – and blatant – pursuit of the cases against the PML(N) and the PPP.
Those pleas went unheeded and now, the shoe is on the other foot. Given how some within the current treasury benches were treated, there would be an impulse in the dispensation to pay back, in kind, and with interest, as it were.
In his Sunday press conference, where he also presented a White Paper on his government’s performance, Imran Khan stepped up to defend the First Lady’s friend Farah Shehzadi alias Gogi, against whom NAB has recently initiated an enquiry. The PTI chief, as always, hadn’t sent the memo, so to speak, to any of his spindoctors, including Fawad Chaudhry, who was sitting next to him in Sunday’s press conference, because earlier, the former information minister and others had been taking a ‘Gogi who?’ stance.
Even though one can understand the new government’s vindictive impulses, the principle of the matter should be to cease and desist from anything that resembles political victimisation. This is a better time than any, for the main federal parties to reach a consensus on amending the shoddily drafted NAB Ordinance. The League’s Shahid Khaqan Abbasi even goes to the extent of saying that the Ordinance should be scrapped in its entirety and that the Bureau should be shut down – and its officials be prosecuted for their excesses.
The Ordinance was brought in by a military dictator to further his political ends, many of the apparatchiks of that junta having admitted this in subsequent interviews. But after the return of democracy in 2008, neither the PPP nor the League, both having had a term at the federal government each, used it in the manner that the PTI has in its three-and-a-half-years in power. Tempers would be flaring. But it is time for the two (relatively) more mature parties to break this vicious circle and defang this macabre organisation that doesn’t fight corruption as much as it scuttles the political process.
