The Interior Ministry’s decision to promote an officer of the Federal Investigation Agency in defiance of the Supreme Court orders shows a deep-rooted pattern by Interior Minister Rehman Malik of patronising his cronies regardless of their questionable credentials.
A report in this newspaper reveals that Deputy Director Sajjad Haider, who was convicted and dismissed from the service twice, was reinstated because of his proximity to the interior minister. The Departmental Promotion Committee will take up his case in the first week of November. Its earlier meeting scheduled for October 12 was deferred as the Committee feared that processing the promotion cases of this and other grade 18 officers without having the NRO certificates cross-verified might put the government in trouble.
It is not clear how the ministry is going to meet this prerequisite especially after the apex court’s direction to the federal government not to give official assignments to the NRO beneficiaries. Former OGDC MD Adnan Khawaja and Additional DG of the FIA’s Economic Crime Wing Ahmad Riaz Sheikh were earlier sent home on the basis of this verdict.
There could also be some serious political implications for the ruling elite in this particular case. The aforementioned FIA officers were part of the team which had arrested Mian Nawaz’s father in the raid during the Second Benazir government. The Interior Ministry’s decision to promote Mr Haider is bound to annoy the PML(N) leadership which has already launched a campaign against the incumbent regime it has termed the most corrupt.
The government has not been very comfortable with the judicial reviews of the decisions taken by the executive on different issues falling in its purview. But most of the time it had acted on the judgments delivered by the courts. This should serve as a reminder to the interior minister to avoid causing embarrassment to his party leadership by insisting on the promotion of a convicted officer as this could trigger an unnecessary legal battle.
