If the spate of political arrests during the previous PTI dispensation were being held up as the post-90s gold standard to compare political victimisation with, the current PDM regime is not found wanting either.
The latest example of this is the sedition charge against former finance minister Shaukat Tarin for his alleged attempt at scuttling the government’s negotiations with the International Monetary Fund.
The leaked phone calls of the former finance minister with the former finance ministers of the KP and Punjab governments can be used for political mileage by the other parties, and that they did. But to frame sedition charges on such grounds is rather serious, yet the incumbents seem to be doling out such charges like candy.
The term ‘politics of the 90s’, which we alluded to earlier, is a catchall term that summed up the vicious vindictive nature of politics when the then two major political parties alternated between power in that decade. A constant sequence of from-cabinet-to-gulag-to-cabinet. Though the military establishment was ubiquitous and calling the shots back then as well, it was the political class that was blowing off steam in those heady times. Though the ingress of the deep state in the scheme of things seems to have increased even more, it is still the political class that seems to be on the forefront on this particular category of victimisation, whether it was former PM Imran Khan gloating about how he was going to strip bare the jail cells of his opponents, or it is the framing of sedition charges against the likes of Fawad Chaudhry and Shaukat Tarin.
Though the PML(N) and the PPP did falter on the Charter of Democracy, with the League pursuing the Memogate agenda in full force, they did learn from the mistakes of the 90s and at least avoided brazen political victimisation. It is time for the three major national political parties to sit together and eke out some terms of engagement with each other.
Politics is, by its nature, adverserial and therefore has an element of toxicity baked into it. But it is also, quite famously, the art of the possible. If such an understanding has taken before, it can most certainly be repeated as well.
