The great American war leader and president, FD Roosevelt, had famously described the sneak Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, December 7, 1941, as a “day to live in infamy”.
Few Pakistanis may have heard of FDR but they couldn’t have agreed more with him in the wake of the verdict handed down by their apex court, on April 20, in the famous case heard by a special, 5-judge- bench of the court against PM Nawaz Sharif, in the context of the Panama Leaks. In fact, it took no time for Pakistan’s vibrant social media to go viral with the comment that just like 911 becoming an indelible global vocabulary since that cataclysmic day in New York, in our living memory, 420 would live for
long—perhaps generations—in the collective memory of Pakistanis as a ‘day of infamy’.
It needed little reminding, if at all, for the social media gurus that 420 is that notoriously well-known article of the Indian Penal Code—retained as such in Pakistan’s Penal Code too—which talks of
fraud and cheating.
The apex court itself was guilty of building up an extraordinary hype in the context of the hearings before its special bench of the corruption and money-laundering case brought against Nawaz and
his children. The case was heard over a period of almost five months, in the course of which all five judges asked deeply probing questions from the defendants—Nawaz and his progeny—through their attorneys. That triggered trains of speculation that the court wouldn’t let off Nawaz lightly.
But an element of suspense was injected into the affair when at the end of all the long hearings, around the end of February the court reserved its judgement.
Withholding the judgement on a case that had kept millions of Pakistanis glued to its proceedings in the court made no sense to the laymen and intelligentsia alike. The search for a plausible explanation
for withholding the verdict grated on their nerves.
Justice in Pakistan has a history that doesn’t make pleasant reading to most Pakistanis. It’s a history replete with instances of the privileged and the powerful invariably managing to bend the law in their favour. The apex court has had huge question marks hung over its avowed impartiality since the early years of Pakistan. It was back in 1955 that the court had invented a macabre “law of necessity” to justify the autocratic and whimsical dissolution of Pakistan’s first Constituent Assembly a year earlier.
That notorious law wasn’t a one-time exception; it became, instead, a rule in innumerable instances when it was invoked to give a clean chit to those soldiers of fortune—Pakistan’s successive Bonapartes—who made a mockery of justice and shredded the country’s Constitution at will. In this case, however, the court, conscious of the people’s trust-deficit in its impartiality, seemed poised to turn a new leaf by assuring the nay-sayers that its ‘historic verdict’ in the case would be remembered for at least “twenty
years”.
That whetted appetites among a people who’d found Nawaz and his thieving clan guilty as charged in their own court. Pakistanis had little doubt that Nawaz had amassed enormous wealth through corrupt means and had indulged in money laundering to siphon off his ill-begotten wealth to off-shore companies, in his children’s names—as revealed in Panama Leaks—and bought expensive properties in London’s hi-end neighbourhoods.
The people only aspired for the Supreme Court putting its seal of approval on their popular verdict and vindicate the bar of public opinion as a court of last resort. The rosy promise from the court that its judgment would be long remembered was seen as a fillip to what the people had already decided.
However, the April 20 split, 2:3, judgment was cold comfort to those who had kept their gun-powder dry for 57 days in anticipation that the scales of justice would tilt in their favour and they’d be able to blast Nawaz with it. But that was not to be. The court, not for the first time, doused the popular expectations with crass expediency by opting for further probe into shenanigans and manipulations of Nawaz and his progeny. It favoured putting in place a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) of civil and military officials to go through the past and present financial doings of the Nawaz clan with a fine-toothed comb and submit its report to the court within 60 days.
Reading the court’s judgement one does agree with the educated inference that all five judges have found Nawaz lying to the nation, deceiving the Nation Assembly and hiding the truth by mouthing a
series of lies. Two of the five judges, including the one heading the bench, favoured declaring Nawaz a liar and untrustworthy and, thus, unfit to be PM according to the country’s constitution.
But the common man remains unconvinced. Delaying a final verdict is, conventional wisdom says, buys more time for Nawaz to concoct evidence to get him off the hook. Knowing his autocratic proclivities, few expect the JIT allowed to function freely and independently. A team of serving officers will, per se, be susceptible to manipulations and string-pulling by Nawaz and cohorts brazenly riding roughshod over norms of decency and decorum. Their style of governance has been anything but democratic and above-board.
Dismay and despair are stalking the land, haunting a psychologically bruised people, who feel short-changed. A tainted and controversial decision from a hung court and its presumed whitewash of Nawaz’s guilt is hard for them to stomach. Plato, centuries ago, summed it up so well when he said, ‘Justice is like a spider’s web; insects get caught in it but bigger animals tear it down.’
The author is former Pakistani diplomat
Email: K_K_ghori@hotmail.com