EDITORIAL: Former prime minister Imran Khan is right to want the controversial high-level leaked audio tapes investigated, at the highest level, and stopped before they cause any more harm to the country’s politics as well as its reputation.
He’s made pretty contentious comments about such things himself in the past, while he was still PM, but then he took the smart position that while such surveillance is a fact of life, especially in third world countries effectively run by powerful establishments, disseminating it is an entirely different ballgame.
Regardless, his decision to knock at the door of the apex court and demand a joint investigation team (JIT) or a judicial commission to probe this phenomenon is the right one, given the circumstances, and should result in very important precedents; hopefully, before any more damage is done.
It must be mentioned, though, that while such acts obviously cross the line, our most prominent politicians only start to have problems with them when their own closets start to reveal skeletons from the past – which is not the right way to deal with them – and there are no exceptions in this.
Unfortunately, even this matter is not enough to bring the political elite on the same page, despite the fact that it exposed the PML-N (Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz) hierarchy first. But back then PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf) went to town on it instead of realising that it was already an easy target.
Indeed, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif has asked the obvious question of how foreign dignitaries will ever trust Pakistan’s security arrangements again; which means that you can forget about any of them ever raising any sensitive matters while they are in Islamabad.
Yet now that he is the head of state, when this is playing out in public, he bears the responsibility of making sure that it is handled in a professional and effective way.
It will be very difficult, even for the top court, to figure out who planted the bugging devices in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and Prime Minister’s House (PMH) because whoever did it is obviously not going to volunteer a confession.
And when these things are carried out by trained clandestine operatives it’s unrealistic to expect much of a lasting footprint. That is why it will require the full combined force of all affected parties, led by the sitting government itself, to get the kind of results that will matter.
And considering that these things by their very nature happen below the radar, there’s really no telling if a judicial inquiry will really put an end to it. The best thing, then, ought to be formalising official scrutiny in strict adherence to the law, as in all advanced democracies.
In America, for example, nothing less than a green-light from a congressional committee can grant permission to tap top level phone calls and residences. And there’s no question of any conversations leaking on the internet just because certain individuals or parties need to be brought in line.
It now remains to be seen how this issue proceeds once the court takes it up. No doubt there will be a lot of heat for certain journalists and media houses that telegraphed some of these leaks ahead of time; back when nobody was supposed to know about them.
There are obviously layers upon layers in this shady business, and it now falls on the Supreme Court to take them off one by one and reveal the truth about people and outfits bent upon exposing others.
Pakistani politics has never been known for its simplicity. Yet it’s never been quite as unpredictable as these audio leaks have made it. There is no doubt that such practices need to be investigated and handled immediately but carefully.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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