- Alleged wretched conditions of Shahbaz Sharif’s cell
Sometimes the country’s chief accountability agency seemingly exhibits a marked lack of tact, correctness or basic decency, as in the case of accused senior professors, including the former vice-chancellor of Punjab University, all retired and elderly persons, who were produced in an accountability court heavily bound in chains, a piteous and stony-hearted spectacle indeed. Interrogators are also fierce careerists, in a manner of speaking, and their goal is to break the will, spirit and resistance of cringing detainees to obtain confessions and retrieve any withheld information. Barbaric physical torture is now complemented by more subtle and sophisticated psychological techniques of breaking down a stubborn captive. The latter are occasioned by presence of numerous international human rights watchdogs, vigilant media and the fear among perpetrators of future retribution for crimes and abuses (excluding, of course, the US and Israel) in neutral international courts.
Tehmina Durrani, outspoken wife of the three-time Punjab former chief minister and present leader of the opposition in the national assembly, Shahbaz Sharif, met her husband in NAB headquarters recently, where he is on physical remand in a corruption case, and she has raised some questions or controversy over his claustrophobic jail quarters, lack of access to legal counsel and of the jailor-investigator duo preventing privacy of conversation with visitors. She has claimed that the prominent politician is confined to a small, dark, windowless cell in the inner recesses of the building, with no awareness of the time, even of day and night, and contended this was tantamount to mental torture. Further, since he was allegedly barely interrogated for half an hour every day, there was no need for his physical remand, which has paradoxically been extended by another 14 days. The NAB should practice an even-handed and uniform treatment between those who enter its ‘parlour’ and those who attempt to brazenly evade it by pleading ‘ill-heath’ and ‘security concerns’ while sitting safely abroad, in the interests of fair play, and for the sake of its own and the country’s image. Inexplicably, the PML-N has not come out on the issue with its usual concerted, vociferous and unified stance.
