To the saner voices, the revelations that were Panama Papers offered a rare opportunity to create pressure for reforming the accountability and transparency mechanisms for high offices. But nearly eight weeks since, political pressure has ebbed and flowed, without any meaningful breakthrough, or any hopes of getting one.
It seems that the politicians have botched it again. Instead of first clearing the Prime Minister's family's name from the fracas, the Nawaz government widened the scope of a proposed investigation to an unrealistic level. So broad was that scope that the Supreme Court, after sitting on the government TORs for nearly a month, brutally made short work of them last week.
Perhaps feeling a little too paranoid, the PM has been on a populist roll, inaugurating this project and that in the less-scorching environs of Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It is another matter that many of the "new" projects that the PM has recently inaugurated are reportedly not so new.
Projecting the image of a hounded underdog, the PM is in a complete campaign mode. He is having nice photo-ops. He is now regularly seen in those rallies discharging salvos his rivals way. But any appetite for personal accountability is missing. The areas he has been visiting lately, however, have received cosmetic makeovers. The PM must think it would suffice.
Even the opposition, it seems, has been beating about the bush. The basic mistake they have committed is that they made their campaign about the Prime Minister (an individual, a powerful one) and not about the leakages that allow powerful individuals to exploit the system. Different opposition parties had varying motivations, but all of them focused more on putting pressure on the PM than on rallying for reforms.
The lack of interest in pushing for serious reforms could be explained by the fact that nearly every political party has stalwarts who have skeletons to hide and shells buried offshore. This may have severely undercut their credibility with people. It didn't help when the compromised opposition deployed a holier-than-thou rhetoric to put the PM in the dock. Now it seems that the joint opposition is going to fray.
The less said about electronic media the better. Partisan talking heads are seen raising self-righteous hoopla on talk-shows every night. Their fever pitch may have already made people numb.
Through their actions in the last one and a half months, Pakistan's deeply-flawed politicians, both inside and outside the government, have left a dangerous void. The Prime Minister should have taken his role as a fledgling democracy's custodian seriously. But the song is not over yet. He can still engage the opposition and come up with sweeping legislation to enforce transparency at the highest levels. He should know all too well that folks cheer on whoever gives even a semblance of going for accountability.
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