Perception of real actors being shielded still persists
It was no complicated case requiring the services of a Sherlock Holmes.
A top-level huddle attended by Prime Minster, Chief Minister Punjab, three senior cabinet ministers and the DG ISI. The Foreign Secretary who is now Pakistan’s ambassador to the US makes a presentation on a sensitive issue. Only a handful of outsiders could have access to what transpired in the meeting. Within no time a national daily publishes a detailed story of the proceedings.
.
A cross checking would have enabled any investigator to pin the responsibility on one or more individuals within a couple of weeks. That finally the Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on foreign affairs (who is a former diplomat) along with another government official has been held responsible for divulging the proceedings would raise many eyebrows.
Diplomats and bureaucrats are notorious for holding information rather than publicising it. The government will have to explain what motivated the accused to do something that would not have benefited them personally but could have put their careers in jeopardy. Did they do it at someone else’s direction who thought it would be useful for the government to make the information public? Why was the Foreign Office not taken into confidence till the completion of the enquiry involving PM’s Special Assistant, causing the FO t embarrassment all the more so when a day earlier it had contradicted the news publicly threatening legal action against those publicising it?
Has the Information Minister who was sidelined soon after the leak been exonerated in the report? Why did the government delay preparing the enquiry report for more than six months? That the report was presented to the Prime Minister finally after the formation of the JIT by the Supreme Court and the resolve subsequently expressed by the military to play ‘due role’ in JIT’s probe of the Sharif family raises questions of another kind.
There is a need to address the plethora of reservations bring expressed. Unless this is done, the report will satisfy neither the common man nor those on whose insistence it has been finalised.
