Panamagate…shadows closing in

Islamabad diary

Back in the old days when Nawaz Sharif was the darling of the ISI and every other agency in the land, and was being boosted and propped up to undermine and thwart the PPP, the mantra on the lips of security specialists was that the PPP was a national security risk. Nawaz Sharif and company used to chant, without intermission, that the PPP and Pakistan could not coexist.

If a PPP government had been deemed responsible for the inspired leak appearing on Dawn’s front page it would have been roasted alive. And Nawaz Sharif would have donned a black coat, as he did during Memogate, and stood before the Supreme Court demanding the severest action against this act of ‘treason’. But this is the PML-N, party of Punjab, and its Punjab connection comes to its rescue. Our national security standards are not the same everywhere. In Sindh and Balochistan different yardsticks apply. In Punjab the parameters of national security are altogether different.

But today the scenario is changing…or indeed has already changed drastically. A number of factors are coming together to darken Punjab’s hitherto serene skyline. And the Raiwind barons, or Panama barons as I suppose we must now call them – their unflagging spirit of enterprise winning them this title – are worried. You can see this in their faces.

The factors are three: Panama, relations with the army and that headache for which the barons have not found a cure, Imran Khan. Panama is hovering over their heads. The army is casting angry looks at them, the Dawn leak being an open admission of plunging relations with the army and ISI. And Imran is preparing to knock at the gates of Islamabad. One of these problems would be enough for any knight-in-armour. Three together makes for a dangerous cocktail.

And the Sharifs have no plan. They are just holding on, hoping that somehow, through some miracle as yet unforeseen, the clouds will part and sunshine will come streaming in. Nisar Ali Khan, the sharpest mind in the PML-N, has taken a very pro-army line on the Dawn leak. What’s passing through his mind? Is he positioning himself for something? In times such as these, and given the charged atmosphere prevailing, conspiracy theories take wing.

It is not a good sign for the Sharifs that the Supreme Court is set to begin hearings on the Panama scandal this week. They’ll need smart lawyers, the smartest, to spin something about the Mayfair flats and the offshore accounts – in the names of the two sons and the Princess Royal, Maryam Nawaz – which can remotely satisfy their lordships.

For decades the Sharifs hid from public view details of the accounts and the properties – not a word about them in their tax returns or their election nomination papers. These are offences under the relevant Pakistani laws and anyone found guilty of them is liable for disqualification from public office.

So this much should be clear that much hangs on the outcome of these hearings. Recall that the Supreme Court registrar had dismissed the Panama petitions describing them, inexplicably, as “frivolous”. My Lord the Chief Justice on being approached rejected the stance of the registrar. And on a PTI petition praying that the petitions be heard expeditiously, the hearings start this week.

Everything is happening in slow motion, without any of the theatre and histrionics of the Iftikhar Chaudhry period when their lordships would beat their drums and utter portentous remarks that would immediately become breaking news on television.

The present court is quieter, but not the less effective for that. When the PM approached it for the setting up of a toothless judicial commission to look into the Panama scandal, My Lord the Chief Justice refused to go along with the sham, suggesting that the government come up with something better, without drama or fanfare the ball lobbed back into the government’s court. When judicial history is written this court may well be remembered for the prudence and vigour of its decisions. Now a momentous case opens…and so much is at stake.

As I say, the PML-N will need some very smart lawyers. Legal errand boys who’ve been looking after the Sharifs’ personal affairs over the years – let me not name anyone – will not do the trick.

There’s a feeling in the air, and you can almost touch it, that we are at a turning point, that we have reached the end of an era and something new is about to happen. Again there is no crash of thunder, no roll of the drums…nothing like the movement against Bhutto or the agitation against Ayub Khan. It’s all happening on a lower scale…more like a funeral march than anything more ringing.

What did the poet say? ‘The mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small’. We are seeing this process for ourselves. It’s a sign of this that even Sharif drummers and chorus-boys in the media, a whole brass band of them out there, are speaking in low voices.

When those three musketeers, more colourful than anything Dumas could have portrayed, Pervaiz Rashid, Talal Chaudhry and Daniyal Aziz go relatively quiet, can there be a surer sign than this that the Sharifs are in choppy waters? And where’s my friend, Rana Sanaullah? What’s happened to him? Now was the season to speak out against Bonapartism. But he too seems to have lost his chutzpah.

With multiple troubles thus arrayed, this was a time for treading carefully and not being over-clever. But impelled by God knows what impulse or consideration they went about in studious fashion to rile the army. The Dawn leak itself makes clear that the meeting was little better than a setup.

The foreign secretary first gives a disquisition on Pakistan’s growing isolation and then when the ISI chief asks why the provincial governments don’t move against terrorist elements Shahbaz Sharif counters by saying that when they move against ‘jihadis’ the agencies come in the way. When there is a stunned silence in the room the prime minister becomes peacemaker and says that it’s not the ISI chief’s fault. These were state policies and we all bear responsibility.

First the setup, then the sympathetic intervention. Still, so far, so good. But then these geniuses had to go and leak the whole thing to Dawn. Whatever impression Dawn may choose to give now, it did not pluck the story from the trees or the skies. It got it from someone – not some Deep Throat operating from the shadows but, as the whole content of the leak makes clear, from someone in government, someone in the know.

This not about freedom of expression or information, the spin sections of the media have given it. It is about blowing the contents of a secret meeting…details of which, whichever way you judge it, should have remained secret.

But they couldn’t resist the temptation: first rap the ISI chief on the knuckles and then publicize the whole thing, first the inquisition and then the publicity. The insult and the offence come not from the rap on the knuckles but the publicity…and this at a time when not just the ISI but Pakistan as a whole is being denounced by India for being the ‘mothership of terrorism’. If this were to happen to the CIA or Mossad or RAW, what would their reaction be?

Why was this drama enacted, to serve what end? Over-cleverness or are they out of their minds?

Email:bhagwal63@gmail.com