Dunya’s Kamran Shahid pretty much won the airwaves last week when former president General Pervez Musharraf admitted on the former’s show that it was, indeed, General Raheel Sharif who had interfered on his behalf and had relieved the government pressure on him.
Though it was an open secret in the political circles of the country, but here he was, the man himself, admitting on live TV that the recently retired army chief had helped him out.
I have been his senior and I am grateful for him scuttling the “politically motivated” cases against me, said Musharraf.
On the Pakistani commentariat, any army chief’s retirement is always a case of “the King is dead, long live the King!” The myriad failures of the last guy become apparent to our eagle-eyed pundits only when the new one comes in. Kayani was a “professional, thinking man’s general” only when he was in power; some of the sycophantic pundits had also remarked on how even the man’s face cut resembled that of the Quaid (there was a passing resemblance.) It was only when the man retired when we were regaled with gleeful details of the stories of his brother’s alleged corruption.
Though Raheel Sharif might not have any dirt on him on the corruption front, we can expect a lot of dirt of other variety to start slipping out little by little.
Commenting on the disclosure, again on Kamran Shahid’s program, military robot Sheikh Rasheed said that it was not only Raheel Sharif that had helped out Musharraf in his legal tribulations but also Ashfaq Kayani.
Now, even if we were not to believe Rasheed’s disclosure about Kayani, the fact of the matter remains that this is not an issue of one army chief in particular. There is something fundamentally, inherently wrong in the sort of institution where this sort of thing is even possible for a chief to be able influence the outcome of court cases like this. It is a clear cut indication of unprofessionalism.
But don’t expect the commentariat to veer things off in that direction. Expect all criticism, if any, to be about the single person called Raheel Sharif.
Even on the political front, see Imran Khan’s tweet: “Musharraf’s claim that General Raheel Sharif pressured judiciary to remove him from ECL deepens perception that powerful can violate laws with impunity.”
We didn’t see any of that bluster when Raheel Sharif was in office, did we?
