The plot is thickening. Rumours are that the President and all his men would not be celebrating the New Year in Islamabad. Reportedly, the game is that all the cases against the President and his men would be reopened once the NRO cover is wrapped up. And then build a moral pressure on the President to resign and face the cases. Whether he is acquitted eventually or not, at least the establishment would get him out of the way.
While the whole hullabaloo is about the NRO and legitimisation of corruption, the real charge sheet against the president was published by a fellow journalist, who has excellent sources in the establishment. The President, who has so many alleged skeletons in his cupboard, according to this report is charged for having said that Pakistan has no threat from India; he is charged for having asked the India-friendly Karzai to share the stage with him on his first official press conference; he is charged for daring to offer that our ISI Chief will visit India to discuss the Mumbai attack; he is charged for supporting the Kerry-Lugar bill openly. The bill that has 'blasphemous clauses' regarding an elected civilian government's control over the armed forces; and so on and so forth.
So once again, an elected government has to pay the price of trespassing the sacred domain of National Security. The problem with these politicians is that they do not learn from history and repeat the same mistakes. Whenever they come to power, they start taking themselves too seriously without understanding that the real power is vested elsewhere. In a controlled democracy, they have to play Zafarullah Jamali or Shaukat Aziz. Serious matters of national security should be left to those who have made a mess of it in the last sixty years.
There is no doubt that the National Security Policy followed so far has failed miserably. Thus, there is an immediate need to revamp it drastically by the civilian government. Indeed, they have to take inputs from the armed forces but not dictate. This is where President Zardari was reckless. He should have realised and trod this path patiently and prudently. Unwittingly, he has tried to bite more than he can chew, relying on the backing of Washington. Little does he realise that Washington has always been unreliable when it comes to choosing sides between a civilian government and the armed forces.
He should have realised that to spread his wings, he has to first keep his own house in order by offering improvement in governance and reduction in corruption. But unfortunately, his government record is not enviable on both counts. There is no doubt that corruption is widespread in this country, which cannot be condoned.
But most of the people who complain about this in their drawing rooms, or on TV, have either not paid their taxes honestly or have bribed the people to get extra favours. It is a part of all capitalist economies; the difference is that of degrees. If we look around, the record of developed and developing countries, they are all the same. Britain, which is the oldest democracy, has MPs who file inflated bills and have been caught charging small money for raising inspired questions in the parliament to help businesses.
In neighbouring India Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao was arrested on charges of corruption but the case could not be proved against him. There were also allegations against Rajiv Gandhi in the Bofors Scandal. But in all civilised countries, the cases are registered against the politicians under normal law. There are no discriminatory laws for trying to pin down corrupt government officials. Hence, they don't need a bad law like the NRO to save these leaders from prosecution after a political compromise. The burden of proving to the court that the charges against a politician have been framed to victimise them is on the defendant. I understand this clause has been inserted in the revised NRO, but in the heat of rejecting the total bill nobody is talking about it. Anyway, though late, the bruised government has stepped back on the NRO issue.
The media in Pakistan has always resisted the promulgation of the media-specific defamation laws maintaining that there are sufficient laws in the country that can be invoked by any affected person. Similarly, what has to be understood is that most of the cases registered against holders of public office, should be under normal anti-corruption laws. We don't need the politically-motivated Ehtesab Bureau or NAB for investigating and prosecuting people. And we don't need the promulgation of the National Reconciliation Order (NRO) either.
This is not the first time that the government has taken back cases against holders of public office. Ayub Khan disqualified politicians, who were later rehabilitated. Ghulam Ishaq Khan declared Asif Zardari the most corrupt man in his speech announcing the sacking of the PPP government and a few months later, he was seen swearing Zardari as a minister. Nawaz Sharif was ousted with charges of loan defaults and tax cases, he returned to power and all cases against him were thrown in the dustbin.
Though the PML(N) is now opposing the NRO, it signed the Charter of Democracy which talks against political victimisation. So implicitly, there is a NRO hidden in the CoD. The fact that the PPP and PML(N) accepted each other shows that they were not serious about the corruption cases filed by them during their tenure. It was accepted by both parties that, in future, they would refrain from political victimisation of each other. Interestingly, no political party sought the disqualification of Zardari when he was contesting the presidential elections, although we know his past record.
So the best way to fight corruption of the politicians is to expose them and insist that they should not be elected in the next election. Cases under normal laws should be filed against them and the rest of the work should be left to the judiciary. All other shortcuts lead to the weakening of the democratic process, which is in the infancy stage.
But a point to be remembered is that no government has been thrown out in Pakistan, just because they were corrupt, they are shunted out because they tried to claim their rightful place in the political structure of Pakistan. Because they have different national security prescriptions than the one followed by the establishment. These old policies have brought us to the wanton killings of civilians and our army soldiers by the same Jihadists who were called strategic assets till yesterday. The attack on the most vulnerable President is not only because of his cronies and corruption tales; it is because he talked "out of turn on building relations with India, America and Afghanistan" much to the dislike of the establishment. The democrats are not taking this important factor into account. The camouflage of the corruption war is to tame the civilian government and keep the control with the establishment, which has ruined this country. (ayazbabar@gmail.com)