While the judiciary and its workings have been the cause of high drama yesterday, it would do us, as a polity, well to take a step back and look at the malaise that surrounds the mechanics of our judicial system.
The hamfisted, intrinsically defective case against Ali Wazir is a case in point, where an elected representative of a constituency (a restive one at that) was jailed for over two years, only to eventually be released. Who is to pay the father of six back those years? Him and his PTM associate, the NDM’s Mohsin Dawar, were also in jail during the last government over the Kharqamar incident, in which the state ultimately conceded that it was the aggressor and actually paid compensation to the families of the fallen PTM members, whose killing was captured in high definition by multiple cell phone cameras.
This attitude isn’t limited towards PTM and PTM-adjacent voices but also the political opposition. Though all cases against the League has gaping holes, the ones against Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Miftah Ismail were glaringly flimsy. But it didn’t stop at that. These two had to put in month on end in jail. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, we can see Shehbaz Gill, Fawad Chaudhry and others facing a similar, if diminutive, fate.
And it doesn’t stop at the political class as well. What about the bureaucracy? If the cases against the likes of former principal secretary to the PM, Fawad Hassan Fawad and Ahad Cheema were indeed strong, then an establishment-backed PTI government could have shaken a conviction out of the system. That didn’t happen, but the time that they spent in jail remains unaccounted by Lady Justice.
It is a sad state of affairs when acquittal from (presumably) sham cases is thought of as a personal victory, with even victims not decrying their illegal incarceration.
