Lest it’s forgotten

You can distort but never change history

Divine justice is defined as the constant and unchanging will of God to give everyone what is due to him or her. Unfortunately, it has come to be human nature to forget that every possible form of justice is possessed by God and he is infinite. When in authority people tend to believe that they are almighty and invincible too. They only learn much sooner than later that there exists a power beyond any control when the shoe starts pinching them.

Profuse lamentations by the deposed Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif and his firebrand daughter over their pathetic plight at the hands of National Accountability Court are much more of the same. He blames former dictator General Pervez Musharraf of having established National Accountability Bureau for his political vendetta against him. He thinks public memory is short and he can conveniently cover up his own debris of misdeeds against his political opponents who he wanted to bury to foist himself as life time Amir al Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful) in 1999 before he was shown the door. He needs to remember that it was he who set the vendetta trail of accountability to fix his political opponents.

Short memory and miniscule thinking span are advantages for those who don’t learn lessons from their past mistakes. The former Prime Minister has conveniently forgotten that it was an Accountability Cell under his Gestapo-like hatchet man Senator Saifur Rehman that was out to victimise twice-elected Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband to eliminate them politically so that he gets sweat-free travel far in pelf and power, ill-gotten gold and glitter.

In the lust for absolute power they did their ugliest best to fabricate cases against Pakistan’s only international face, a political figure of iconic stature, forced her into exile by getting a gun-point judgment against her and her husband by the Accountability Court headed by Justice Malik Qayum. It was a stinking judgment so criminally faulty that the Supreme Court quashed it with severe strictures against the Accountability judges.

Profuse lamentations by the deposed Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif and his firebrand daughter over their pathetic plight at the hands of National Accountability Court are much more of the same

Later intelligence tapes of orders conveyed to Justice Malik Qayum by Senator Saifur Rehman to carry out as directed by the then Chief Justice of Lahore High Court, Federal Law Minister Khalid Anwar and the present Chief Minister of Punjab emerged, the sordid drama got exploded bringing into international ill-repute how low our judges could stoop to please their masters.

In their callous vendetta they not only held Asif Ali Zardari incarcerated without any conviction for eleven long years.

Somewhere in my newspaper clippings I have an old copy of Financial Times carrying hair-raising tales of third-degree methods of torture inflicted on Pakistanis as well as international executives of mega power projects like Hubco by Senator Saufur Rahman and his strong team of Tara Masihs. The Senator needed ‘confessions’ against Bibi and AAZ as such innocent executives of multi-nationals were hung upside down until they forcibly confessed to bribery.

It was a real tragedy that Mian Sahib and his cronies were blinded by their lust for power that they did not care for the fact that Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had introduced an ambitious power generation policy at competitive rates attracting billions in foreign investment in the energy sector to put in top gear the nation’s industrial growth. Both Mian Sahib and his successor General Musharraf accepted on television that they had inherited surplus power and they were looking for export markets.

Flanked by some of the culprits involved in the ransacking of the Supreme Court and manhandling of the then CJP late Justice Sajjad Ali Shah in 1998, Mian Sahib somehow regretted his involvement in the Memogate conspiracy against the PPP government in his chat with journalists after his appearance in the Accountability Court on Tuesday. One remembers how happy he was wearing a black-coat along with his cronies in castigating the then Prime Minister in the alleged involvement in Memogate to please the then Chief Justice, Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry out there to gun down the government and the President.

This was not the first time when he had been in cahoots with the establishment against PPP. It happened in 1988 at the time of elections when his cronies airdropped fabricated pictures of Bhutto ladies to defame them. Being the king pin in the conspiracy to stop Bhutto’s landslide he raised the secessionist slogan of “Jaag Punjab Jagg”. Next he opened up his coffers to oust Prime Minister Bhutto through a vote of no-confidence but failed.

In an anti-judiciary atmosphere vitiated by the PML-N campaign venomously carried out against the apex court judges following his conviction and disqualification, now he is having second thoughts and says that he would see to it that NAB and Accountability Courts are abolished in future. Here too he has forgotten the fact that he was co-signatory along with martyred Benazir Bhutto to the Charter of Democracy incorporating the process of transparent accountability through an impartial National Accountability Bureau.

Last but not the least, one could appreciate his reassertion that all the vital national institutions should work within the parameters provided in the constitution. No two views about it. Perhaps the statement by COAS General Qamar Javed Bajwa that the army as an institution would stand by the judiciary to ensure its decisions are implemented—has blunted the vicious attacks on the judiciary by the PML-N’s foul mouthed goons.