- Imran Khan staring at corruption cases within own PTI
The PM is learning the hard way the significance of the cliché about people not throwing stones at others if they dwell in glass houses. To gain political power, especially if it represents the last desperate fling at it, principles have to be sacrificed and pet policies dumped. But, the ‘latelings’, opportunists who deserted their parties and stampeded towards PTI , sensing its victory on July 25, were not paragons of purity, incorruptibility and financial orthodoxy themselves. The excess baggage of ill-repute carried by so-called ‘electables’ raised indignant eyebrows and sharp hackles among PTI rank and file, as it nullified the party’s ‘ruling passions’ of an unshakable crusade against corruption and grooming of youthful leadership. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, as NAB inquiries are regularly being opened, or likely to be instituted against well-known turncoats, and the PTI old guard as well, at least one of whom has not turned out to be ‘white as the driven snow’ under closer scrutiny.
Former PTI Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa chief minister and current defence minister is reportedly at the epicentre of an alleged land scam, a web of corruption spun in connivance with leading provincial bureaucrats, including present principal secretary to the PM, who has been summoned by NAB on October 25. The case pertains to the little matter of illegally leasing out 275 acres of KP Forest Department land to the popular tourist resort of Malam Jabba in Swat district. A suspicious case of ‘wheels within wheels’ indeed. The defence minister is already facing NAB inquiry in the matter since September 2018. Now, a newspaper report holds that, in a cabinet meeting on Friday, the PM himself confirmed opening of inquiries against three PTI ministers on corruption allegations and renewing his pledge of zero tolerance against corruption, irrespective on whom the axe falls. The PM’s two decades long struggle against corruption cannot be doubted or slighted, but this case represents the litmus test for him, as also for NAB, with its ‘accountability for all’. There should not be a whiff of some being weeded out, others left untouched. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, must be the maxim.