ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif often claim to be leading two cleanest governments in Pakistan’s shaky history, with arguments like absence of court cases against them.
They often also challenge their political opponents in rallies,who had landed in hot waters for alleged crimes committed during their time in power, and ask them why they hadn’t taken the Sharifs to court if they had proofs of financial corruption against them.
While it’s true that the two Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)supremos are not facing any corruption charges but that does not by itself proves their governance to be clean. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), PML-N’s main rival, would blame the plethora of corruption cases against PPP leaders on the judicial activism of the former chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and the accompanying political propaganda.
According to the PPP the present PML-N government is guilty of more serious wrongdoings and bad governance than theirs are accused of.Throughout its five years in power from 2008 to 2013, the Supreme Court remained stacked with suomotu charges, as well as cases filed by the government’s rivals.
The electronic and print media relished in reporting and commenting on every bit of the myriad charges against former Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and his cabinet members. In those years, the Supreme Court was the most happening place. There were many incidents of apparent bad governance of the PPP government, which the court turned into suomoto proceedings.
An instance of that is the Pakistan Steel Mills remaining in headlines for the suo motu probe into how the huge public sector entity, once a national pride, fell into ruins. Today the mills, once an enterprise of national pride, stand literally redundant. But little is heard about that except for a few stories in the media.
Now retired Justice Iftikhar was also obsessed with the postings and transfers in the powerful bureaucracy during his time in office. There was the famous Anita Turab case in which the officer had moved the Supreme Court against the “politicisation of bureaucracy” and seeking merit-based appointments. The case brought huge bad press to the PPP government in its twilight years under the Raja Parvez Ashraf as prime minister. Turab won the case, with a sweeping court ruling against politicisation and violation of merit.
But the PML-N government seems to have luck as the present Supreme Court rarely invoked its right to take suo-moto notice. A few weeks ago, a group of senior Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) officials challenged the promotion of their two colleagues to BPS 22 who occupied 10th and 16th place in the seniority list. However, the development made no waves in the media.
Justice Iftikhar would most likely have taken notice and the apparent infringement would have made big news.When the PPP was in power, top bureaucrats invariably answered the Supreme Court summons for their acts of commission and omission. But nothing of that sort has happened in recent times, though the PML-N lawmakers are known for heavily banking on civil servants for achieving the results they want.
The PPP faced suomoto-inspired cases ranging from oil and gas prices, trade deals and Hajj arrangements to government subsidies on various commodities.But the present PML-N government has survived unscathed accusations of committing blunders of bigger scale. Clearance of circular debt of Rs 400 billion in violation of rules, jacking up of Nandipur power project cost, carrying out Islamabad metro bus project at a bloated price, and appointing junior officers at senior positions, are few cases in point.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran and his party may be trying to incriminate the party all the time, but the PML-N government has escaped the sort of trouble that remained with the PPP until its fall.
