Heat’s up again
The military’s rejection of the Dawn leaks ‘notification’ – even though there’s been no notification so far – is one of those things that are easy and difficult to understand at the same time. If you put the dots together – and this is backed, at least in part, by the grapevine – the gentlemen shown the door might well have ‘leaked’ the story to Dawn’s eager reporter. But that’s not, apparently, where the leak generated, since they were not in the room where ‘that’ meeting took place. So it must first have been leaked to all or any of the three to be made to dawn on the public, at the very least.
And since, some say, the military’s been conducting an investigation of its own, they might have a fair idea of just who the culprit might be, or just what PML-N was trying to achieve by fixing the spotlight on the poor three. It is unlikely, anyway, that any of them could have obtained or chosen to distribute the information on their own. But once the snub was out in the open, there was only so much the ruling party could do. One, it could put its own foot down and storm the press with sanctity of democracy, etc. Or two, it could have buckled.
PML-N, though, has its own ways. First the party’s loudest mouths suddenly went silent. Then the interior minister claimed jurisdiction over the ‘notification’, making the PM office look silly for those sackings. Then the government decided to come out with ‘another notification’. And then, quite interestingly, it made veiled threats of pulling the Abbotabad Commission Report out of the closet. That this happened just after Sharif’s secret Murree meeting with Sajjan Jindal shows just why civ-mil friction is on the rise again. With the Panama JIT in place, opposition agitation on the rise, and elections not too far, the N-league is now turning up the heat with the boots instead of trying to cool temperatures. It seems you can be not quite Napoleonic and still have Napoleonic failings.