ISLAMABAD: Taking full advantage of the opposition’s absence
from the National Assembly, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)
leaders on Tuesday launched unprecedented attacks on the country’s
judiciary, accusing it of having different standards for Nawaz Sharif
than for his opponents.
After an opposition walkout over
the Fata issue left the ruling PML-N and its allies alone in the lower
house, two of the government’s most outspoken members took the floor and
delivered speeches similar to the ones they usually make outside the
Supreme Court or at hurriedly-called press conferences at the Press
Information Department.
On the day that his party chief
appeared before an accountability court in the capital, firebrand
Railways Minister Khawaja Saad Rafique fired the first salvo when he
accused the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) and its leader Imran Khan of
waging “political warfare through the courts”.
“As
someone who did not support the disqualification of Yousuf Raza Gilani, I
cannot support the de-seating of Nawaz Sharif or Jahangir Tareen,” he
said, adding that he had feared all along that such recourse could open
the door to the practice of sending elected prime ministers home through
the courts.
“But the question is: how can two benches
of the same court hand down two different judgements. The law is the
same, but there are two distinct verdicts,” he said.
Though
he prefaced his remarks by saying constitutional institutions should be
respected and judicial decisions should be accepted, he maintained that
the country’s judicial history was littered with “good decisions” and
“controversial judgements that were neither accepted by the people, nor
remembered fondly in history books”.
He lamented how, at
one point, the Supreme Court was centre of all political battles being
waged in the country, and cited the Panama Papers case against former
prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his family as a case in point.
“Obviously,
the courts did not offer to decide the matter; it was taken to them,”
he said, adding that this forced his party to file similar cases against
their opponents — referring to Hanif Abbasi’s petition against Imran
Khan and Jahangir Tareen.
“In Nawaz Sharif’s case, the
story began with Panama [Papers], and when nothing was found, they
rummaged through his family’s decades-old business and ended up
disqualifying him over the income he was supposed to receive from his
son’s company, but didn’t,” Mr Rafique stated.
But in
Imran Khan’s case, he said that even though the PTI chief admitted to
omitting mention of his offshore company in his declarations, “no Joint
Investigation Team (JIT) was formed, no references were filed”.
The
railways minister also pointed out how, in the matter of foreign
funding, the apex court had set a five-year time limit to probe
irregularities. “Everyone knows PTI’s foreign funding scandal dates back
to around 2010. If the law was broken more than five years ago, does it
cease to be a crime?”
“Things have gone wrong. It is
clear now that Nawaz Sharif and his family are being targeted through
judicial decisions, while Imran Khan and his supports are being provided
relief through these verdicts,” he concluded.
Picking up this thread, Privatisation Minister Daniyal Aziz said that the country “has seen this film before”.
Lashing
out at the discrepancy in standards of justice applied to Nawaz Sharif
on the one hand and Imran Khan on the other, he recounted the entire
history of the Panama Papers case and questioned the way the courts had
conducted the matter.
Stopping just short of blaming
Nawaz Sharif’s ouster on a ‘grand conspiracy’, he recalled how the
Jamaat-i-Islami had filed a petition naming all 450 Pakistanis mentioned
in the Panama Papers with the Supreme Court, which was declared
frivolous and rejected.
“Imran Khan then filed a copycat
petition, containing just Nawaz Sharif’s name. That too was thrown
out,” he said, adding that the PTI then staged a ‘failed lockdown’ of
Islamabad to put pressure on the court. But rather than sticking to its
decision, the court changed its mind and took up the cases that were
earlier thrown out.
