Google "Corruption in Pakistan" and there you have your list of familiar culprits -- politicians, police, judiciary, bureaucracy, Transparency International, Pakistan’s rankings and so on.

It is difficult to understand the reality of corruption without first knowing corruption as a political project undertaken by the unelected, non-political people against the political class in this country.

Democratic politics, they say, is self-corrective. It could be just that, a self-correction of democracy, that a new political class has emerged that sees corruption of politicians as the key problem confronting the country. Politics is corrupt; therefore, we need politics that is against this corruption in order to correct it. Or at least that’s how the logic goes.

That’s what the politics of Aam Aadmi Party was about across the border and that is what the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf stands for here. So far so good. But does this new political class in Pakistan know how the discourse on corruption is itself corrupted and how it has impacted the political trajectory of this country.

Perhaps it does but it is not reflected in its political message.

To be fair to PTI, it seeks the cure of corruption from within the democratic system. But that’s not what the anti-corruption mechanisms and legislations, the EBDOs and the PRODAs, were all aimed at. These were essentially tools of political victimisation; the first one the Public and Representative Offices Disqualification Act (PRODA) enacted as early as 1949 was aimed at disqualifying politicians in order to curb provincialism.

Ayub Khan in 1959 passed the Elected Bodies Disqualification Order (EBDO) targeted against politicians especially from National Awami Party and East Pakistan Awami League. These parties were opposed to One Unit and demanded provincial autonomy and a secular constitution. Under EBDO, 75 leaders are said to be disqualified from participating in political activities for eight years, during which time Ayub Khan hoped that a new crop of politicians would have emerged from his Basic Democracies and these people would have been rendered irrelevant.

As noted in "A Review of Anti-Corruption Laws In Pakistan" by Zaheer Ud Din Qureshi, the "real intent of the law becomes clear by the provision that prosecution could be avoided by agreeing not to take part in politics for 15 years. Almost 7000 politicians were banned from politics under the law… From now on political victimisation became the hallmark of every subsequent anti-corruption effort".

Ziaul Haq had a bigger project and even bigger goals. He too began by banning all political activity and, unlike Ayub Khan, saw to it that any violation was punished stringently. In his time, politicians were sent to jail, flogged and the first elected prime minister of the country was hanged to death.

A centralised, now Islamic, state was to be maintained at all costs. The obduracy of the political class reflected in the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD) was brutally crushed, especially in one of the smaller provinces Sindh. Elections were held on non-party basis under a now mutilated constitution which included the solution for the ‘corrupt politician’ -- in the form of Articles 62 and 63. In a way he ‘constitutionalised’ the anti-corruption discourse.

The most dangerous clauses that had stayed silent in all the subsequent years were given a lease of life in the 2009 NRO judgment by former Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. As predicted by some wise people, these articles were again used in last year’s general election by the Returning Officers selectively amid huge criticism. Today, the Supreme Court is hearing a petition filed against the prime minister (Prime Minister Disqualification Case) under the same articles.

The restoration of democracy after the death of Ziaul Haq was attempted with trepidation. The corruption mantra came in handy yet again to oust the elected governments. There were selective media leaks and a whole narrative was built as one government after the other was ousted on charges of corruption throughout the 1990s.

Investigative journalism which had died a natural death by the beginning of the 1990s time came alive as if by magic. Journalists were handed files of the ruling party’s misdeeds and they became celebrities overnight. Interestingly, the judgments of higher courts upholding the dissolutions of assemblies at the hands of successive presidents cited media reports as ‘proofs’ of corruption.

Both the Ehtisaab Bureau of the PML-N (1997) and the National Accountability Ordinance of Pervez Musharraf (1999) had the reputation of exercises in political victimisation and thus futile.

This is the history of political corruption in this country in a nutshell. It excludes a lot -- institutions, institutional corruption, state, private sector and much else. It precludes, as Asad Sayeed says in his important 2010 paper, "Contextualising Corruption in Pakistan", that "civil politicians are more accountable than the military junta for three reasons. First, the logic of electoral democracy itself holds politicians accountable for their misdeeds and lack of delivery to the electorate. Second, various audit and accountability laws apply to politicians, leaving them relatively more susceptible to legal provisions than their uniformed counterparts. Third, their conduct tends to be more transparent because of their greater interface with the public as well as the media."