In his message on the beginning of the new Islamic year, PPP leader President Asif Ali Zardari urged the nation to nurture the qualities of forbearance and tolerance, and shun all differences to strengthen national unity.
A day earlier, talking in a similar tone to his party’s parliamentary leader in the Senate, PML-N leader Mian Nawaz Sharif also called for national unity, emphasising the need to address multifaceted challenges confronting the country.
This they said as a relentless political witch-hunt continues against the main opposition party, the PTI. Its founding chairman Imran Khan, several second tier leaders, and countless activists implicated in multiple legal cases remain in jails for over a year.
Whilst the top leaders of the two major components of the ruling coalition were telling the people to show tolerance in the interest of national unity, the police in Islamabad were preparing to arrest Omar Ayub, Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly.
A joint team of Islamabad and Mianwali raided his Islamabad house on Sunday to arrest him in a case registered with an anti-terrorism court in Sargodha, though they returned empty-handed as he had gone into hiding.
Later, faced with a barrage of criticism, the Mianwali police issued a statement claiming that their sub-inspector had gone to the opposition leader’s residence only to serve bailable warrants, not to apprehend him.
How then do they explain taking along a team of Islamabad police? The explanation they gave can fool no one but the police and their bosses themselves.
It needs be recalled that earlier District & Sessions Judge Muhammad Abbas hearing the same case had complained to the Lahore High Court (LHC) that an intelligence agency’s officer had wanted to meet him in his chamber and that he was being harassed.
The then LHC Chief Justice Shahzad Ahmad Khan — since elevated to the Supreme Court — had taken serious notice of his grievance, summoning the Punjab police chief to find out who wanted to meet the judge.
As the wont of police is in such cases, he resorted to dilly-dallying, annoying Justice Khan to remark “if excuses are to be made, then the courts should be closed”.
The ruling coalition looks bad enough for the arbitrary arrests, judges’ harassment, and disruption of the opposition party’s rallies happening on its watch. Yet last month, the PML-N government in Punjab announced having ‘approved’ legal action (new cases) against Imran Khan and some other PTI leaders for “building a hate narrative against the state institutions [military]”.
Provincial governments do not have the prerogative to initiate such cases. Nonetheless, if the Punjab government insists on pursuing its harebrained scheme to score some brownie points with the power that be, the PTI government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa can respond in a tit-for-tat fashion since Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Maryam Nawaz, now heading the Punjab government, are on record to have publicly made disparaging remarks about the military and its leadership.
Will any of this further sharpen political divide or create national unity avowed by the President and PML-N supremo? They obviously are doing the opposite of what they pretend to believe in. Hypocrisy is writ large on their statements.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024