PM survives but loses moral ground
‘The prime minister of Pakistan stays in power’. This is how Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party read a judgement of the country’s top court on cases of corruption against him and his children that had threatened to topple his government.
“We have succeeded,” said Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif after the Supreme Court ruled there was insufficient evidence to order Sharif’s removal from office over corruption allegations levelled by the opposition based on the Panama Papers leak last year that linked the family to offshore business, and ordered further investigations by anti-corruption and intelligence officials.
“They have said what the PM had already said in his letter (to the Supreme Court last year) that a commission should be constituted to investigate the matter,” said Asif outside the apex court about the verdict that was split 3-2. “We are ready for all kinds of investigation.”
But the country’s major opposition parties — Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf and Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party — want Sharif to stand down.
Khan, who brought the case against Sharif and his family, urged the prime minister to resign for the duration of the probe. “If you’re cleared within 60 days, you can return,” Khan said at a press conference.
“All their explanations on their source of income and money trail have been rejected,” Khan said in Islamabad. “What moral justification has he got left to stay as prime minister?”
But Zardari is more bitter than Khan. “Nawaz Sharif should hand in his resignation,” the former president said addressing a press conference.
“You have failed. You cannot run the government. Give someone else a chance to run the government,” he said while expressing doubts about the probe panel’s success.
Zardari’s party had backed Sharif all along since he came to power in 2013, overtly, covertly and tacitly. It was his party’s support that helped Sharif ride out a sit-in in Islamabad in 2014 by Khan’s party against what they called rigging in 2013 elections that won the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party a majority in the lower house of the parliament, the National Assembly.
The court ruling narrowly that Sharif could keep his job does ease an immediate political crisis for him ahead of the 2018 polls. After the release of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ report based on leaked documents of Panamabased law firm Mossack Fonsecca in April last year, Sharif had pledged to step down if charges were proved.
The panel the 540-page ruling has ordered to be formed in seven days will now probe the allegations and submit a report in 60 days. The order has fallen short of the blow Sharif’s opponents had hoped for.
But since the decision has not handed out any clean chit to the prime minister either, they will now swing into an election mode with something to criticize Sharif for. While both Khan and Zardari, with the likely support of some other political and religio-political parties, will keep putting pressure on Sharif to step down, the PPP co-chairperson is unlikely to go all out against him.
But the ailing, 67-year-old prime minister who received a fairly hard slap on the wrist and is battling a severe energy crisis is not off the hook yet. He will remain vulnerable unless he gets more to cheer about than just a temporary reprieve handed out by the Supreme Court, though not without referring to a phrase inspired by Balzac’s writings and used as the epigraph in Mario Puzo’s novel “The Godfather” — “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
It added a longer quote, also adapted from Balzac’s original prose, that said the secret behind great but unaccounted fortunes is “a crime that was never found out, because it was properly executed.” The Sharif case, the ruling said, “revolves around that very sentence.”
Though Sharif may ride the investigation out, it is highly unlikely that his administration will be able to weather the storm around the charges of corruption Khan and political associates have been mounting protests for.
The prime minister may complete his term as well avoiding major political rallies if he somehow manages to bridle the energy crisis that made the PPP to lose the previous elections. But one thing can be said for sure: Sharif ’s term is up for a rough ride now and the country up for uncertainty until next general elections in 2018.
reporters@khaleejtimes.com