Imran Khan’s political career has survived, Jahangir Tareen’s has not and the PTI politics of change has taken a hit.
The
Supreme Court verdict yesterday was in a case rooted in politics. The
petitioner seeking the disqualification of Mr Khan and Mr Tareen is a
PML-N leader, Hanif Abbasi, who approached the court immediately after
the first hearing in the Panama Papers case was held.
While
the allegations against Mr Khan and Mr Tareen were plainly justiciable
and within the powers of the court to decide, they pertained to
declarations made by the PTI leaders in their nomination papers for the
2013 general election.
Politics was clearly a motive in
the petitions, but just as clearly Mr Khan and Mr Tareen were vulnerable
to legal sanction because of complicated financial dealings that
wealthy Pakistanis have long considered to be the norm, whatever the
letter of the law may state.
Now, if wealthy Pakistanis
begin to consider declaring their wealth and assets more accurately and
politicians start taking declarations in nomination papers more
seriously, a small step in the right direction for the country as a
whole may have been taken.
For the PTI, the survival of
Imran Khan is not vindication enough. The disqualification of Mr Tareen,
the secretary general of the PTI and a figure nearly always seen at the
side of Mr Khan, is a significant blow to a party that has relentlessly
attacked political opponents for alleged corruption and preached that
Pakistan’s progress lies in an unwavering adherence to the rule of law.
Mr
Tareen’s disqualification is also uncomfortably close in judicial
reasoning to the ouster of the former prime minister and PML-N supremo
Nawaz Sharif. Effectively, a top PTI leader has been stripped of public
office for almost the same reason the PTI used to argue Mr Sharif had no
right to hold public office.
In recent years, the PTI’s
brand of insurrectionist, outsider politics has existed uneasily
alongside the party’s embrace of so-called electables. While all
politics is a form of compromise and the gap between what politicians
pledge and what they do is often large, the PTI’s legitimate quest for
power is being undermined by a whatever-it-takes attitude to politics.
The rot within the PTI extends significantly further than just Mr
Tareen.
For the political class as a whole, the Supreme
Court decision ought to be another warning against the growing
judicialisation of politics. The invocation of Article 62(1)f and a
lifetime ban from politics for misdeclaration without underlying crimes
having been proven in a court of law are arguably signs of democracy
headed in the wrong direction.
No one, especially
elected representatives, is above the law, but the law has to be fair,
just and reasonable. A reassessment of the disqualification law is
needed; is the political class willing to do so fairly and
transparently?
