There’s never a dull moment, pundits say glibly, on corruption-centric scandals in what its architects and founding-fathers fondly dreamed would be the ‘Land of the Pure’. With the miasma of the ‘Memogate’ scandal still hanging thick over Pakistan’s air and polluting it like a rotting corpse, the ghost of a 20-year-old scandal has been revived with characteristic gusto that blends so well with the Pakistani penchant for sensation and suspense.
The ‘Mehrangate’, in 1990, had more than its share of a suspense-packed fast-moving ‘thriller.’ In a nutshell, it was a cloak-and-dagger plot hatched by a clutch of Benazir Bhutto-hating politicians and super-patriots generals from Pakistan’s GHQ to keep Benazir out of power. She had been elected to power in the general elections of 1988. Her stint was cut short in 1990, on trumped up charges of corruption and bad governance.
President Ghulam Ishaq Khan was Zia-ul-Haq’s anointed successor. He was also a darling of GHQ’s bumbling brass that adored him for his touted reputation of a ‘Mr Clean.’ This ‘Mr Clean’ shared their fear of Benazir being an ‘enemy’ of Pakistan’s perceived ‘core interests’.
The GIK-military combine especially faulted, and also hated, Benazir for being soft on India. The favourite gossip, in those days, was that Benazir had passed on to Rajiv Gandhi the dossier that detailed all the Pakistani implants in the Indian-held Kashmir. This alleged ‘crime’ was enough, in their blinkered eyes, for Benazir to be strung up the tallest pole of Islamabad.
How could the daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a ‘hawk’ on India who’d sworn to fight a thousand years for the rights of the Kashmiris and eat grass, if necessary, to match India’s entry into the nuclear age, pawn Pakistan’s core interest of India-bashing, argued the chattering gurus. They happened to have the ears of GIK and the generals who agreed that Benazir had to be stopped before she inflicted irreparable damage to Pakistan.
Stopped her, they did, by building up a solid front of politicos arrayed against her. A government-controlled financial outlet, Mehran Bank, was roped in, to dish out funds in abundance to Benazir’s rivals in the arena. It included Nawaz Sharif — who eventually won the carefully choreographed elections of 1990; he and his younger sibling Shahbaz (now the head-honcho of Punjab) were showered with at least 60 million rupees. Other anti-Benazir politicos were favoured likewise. The investment was rewarded. Benazir lost the election.
It was soon after that retired Air Marshal Asghar Khan filed a petition before the apex court suspecting a conspiracy to keep Benazir out in the cold. He’d impeccable credentials and was widely respected by all and sundry for being a genuinely clean politician — a rarity in Pakistan. Pakistan’s Supreme Court sat on Asghar Khan’s petition for years. That was until recently when the court suddenly decided it was time to dust off the petition and give it a public hearing.
Floodgates of scandal opened all over again when the chief character of the macabre money-and-politics drama, Mehran Bank’s erstwhile president, Younus Habib, made an appearance before the court. A frail and wheel-chair-bound Habib’s appearance at court brought all those memories flooding back. He spilled beans of the scandal with the deftness of a surgeon’s scalpel peeling off layers of rotten flesh.
According to him nearly 1.5 billion rupees were withdrawn from the bank at the command of GIK and the then army chief, General Aslam Baig. The cache was handed over to the head of ISI for disbursement to its favoured politicians ready to play the game to keep Benazir out of reckoning at the polls. Habib deposed that anti-Benazir politicians were dished out 240 million rupees for their various campaigns; the rest of the money was given to Baig to be used at his discretion.
Baig, with strong anti-Benazir credentials, used the lucre to favour various commercial enterprises of the military. A hefty chunk of it was then used to lay the foundations of Friends, a think-tank that the general has been presiding over to flash out his intellectual pretensions and pursuits. Friends earned notoriety, over the years, for its India-bashing and anti-US slants. Pakistan’s defrocked generals can’t, somehow, shake off their allergy to India, in particular.
Habib’s account of the scandal could have been laughed off had it not been corroborated, in its entirety, by the then head of ISI, General Asad Durrani. Durrani’s deposition to the court, made years earlier but made public only now, makes clean breast of the episode taking all possible heat out of the military establishment’s much-touted claim of being made up of super-patriots always focused on Pakistan’s clean image.
With the ghost of Mehrangate resurrected in all of its putrid perplexity the question agitating well-informed minds is why should the apex court have deemed it proper to bring it back to life at this sensitive juncture in Pakistan when its plate is full of scandals and crises?
A studied view suggests the apex court, anxious to give currency to the rule of law in Pakistan, has served a timely reminder to military adventurers and their civilian cohorts to lay down their arms and submit to the law of the land. With the next general elections around the corner, the court’s timing is flawless. It wants to clip the wings of ISI and put it on a tight leash lest it goes berserk, again.
A more generous and charitable assessment says the top brass in the military command itself shares the apex court’s perception that Bonapartism of ISI (in particular) needs to be reined in. A contrite and repentant Baig, too, has beseeched the court to order the closure of ISI’s political wing that has wreaked so much havoc in the past.
Taking advantage of the situation, the Zardari-Gilani combine has eased out ISI’s controversial boss, General Ahmed Shuja Pasha and replaced him with a less adventurous general. That may inject some sanity in an otherwise free-wheeling establishment often faulted for being above the law and spawning a state within the state.
Some are also seeing a silver lining on the horizon with India in this development. They say a diminishing of military’s role in Pakistan’s policy-making will impact relations with India favourably. Granting the most favoured nation status to India in trade, they argue, is evidence of army cut to size in policy on India. Good luck, soothsayers; may your dream come true.
(Views expressed in the column are the author’s own)
Karamatullah K Ghori is a former Pakistani diplomat.
E-mail: k_k_ghori@yahoo.com