Investigation matters

Now that the ramifications of the Supreme Court judgment on the Panama Papers leaks are slowly sinking in, a clearer picture is emerging of what is to come. The Supreme Court has sent letters to the FIA, NAB, SECP, SBP, the ISI and the MI asking them to recommend names for its Joint Investigation Committee. The JIT itself will be controversial, especially because of the presence of both civilian and military intelligence agencies, and the opposition is doing everything it can to rob it of its legitimacy. The PPP has already announced that it will reject the JIT, with Aitzaz Ahsan claiming there is no way an employee of the government could investigate the head of that government. He has also claimed that the top ranks of the army are filled with friends of Nawaz Sharif and so the independence of the ISI too could not be guaranteed in the JIT. This statement drew an immediate rebuke from the ISPR. The PTI has taken a similar position to the PPP and continues to demand Nawaz’s immediate resignation. The stage is set once again for a showdown similar to the one we saw last year where the opposition parties were in a rejectionist mood and scuttled any attempt at compromise, forcing the Supreme Court to intervene.

The opposition parties’ worries about the independence of the JIT are overblown. The team will be reporting to the Supreme Court and not the government. The judges have shown they are willing to stand up and will surely not allow members of the JIT to be intimidated. An outright rejection of the JIT is essentially saying the Supreme Court too is not to be trusted. This is occasionally accompanied by complaints that the court did not rule against Nawaz Sharif. To reduce the judgment to that is simplistic since it did not accept Nawaz’s explanation for the London flats and openly questioned other details as well. The problem for the opposition – especially the PTI – is that is committed only to its goal of toppling the government. In its binary world, any action taken which leads to Nawaz being removed from power is worthy of praise and anything which doesn’t result in his dismissal is proof of a conspiracy. The PTI’s target has always been Nawaz Sharif and not corruption.     The rest of us do not need to share the same priority.