What of all those holy cows?
Terming the Panama Joint Investigation Team (JIT) report as based on mere “assumptions and accusations”, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has refused to step down. All Opposition parties have demanded his resignation. However it is only the Supreme Court that can dismiss him, after all two Prime Ministers of the PPP government were made to leave by the same court as well.
The narrative adopted by Imran Khan regarding the Panama Papers case is that accountability has only just begun and will continue until corruption is eradicated completely. The accountability he is referring to is seemingly reserved only for politicians and has not only just begun rather has been done many a time before at the hands of those who have not really dealt with it themselves. This was argued by Javed Hashmi in his latest rant where he asked when judges and the military are held accountable. The answer to that is rarely.
General Pervez Musharraf was allowed to leave the country and has not returned since although he still faces a number of cases here. Even when army officials do stand trial, the extent to which that can go is limited. A case in point is the Asghar Khan case where the FIA has been unable to question the main accused, Ex-Chief of Army Staff General Mirza Aslam Beg and former ISI Chief Lieutenant General Mohammad Asad Durrani, despite the Supreme Court’s final decision in 2012 directing it to do so.
Recently the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC), empowered to hear cases of misconduct against judges, decided against open court cases. The rationale behind this was that “the issue brought before the SJC and the allegations levelled may ultimately prove false, frivolous or vexatious”. Such caution is apparently only reserved for judges and not politicians as proved by the media circus in the Panama Case. No superior court judge has been ousted by the council since 1970s.
The pace of the Panama case is unprecedented in our judicial system where decisions can take decades. Can there be similar haste in cases against the judiciary and the military? For that first cases have to be registered and references filed but that too does not happen very often either.