By Saeed A. Malik
On 3rd May 2018 Nawaz Sharif emerged from the NAB Court, and standing on top of the steps, made a declaration to the assembled group of reporters. He announced that he had many secrets tucked away in his heart, and that when it becomes too onerous for him to hold them, he will begin revealing them.
And on 12 May, to the wild delight of the Indian media, he let out the first installment of the secrets he promised to bare. He expostulated with Cyril Almeida of Dawn: “Militant organizations are active. Call them non-state actors, should we allow them to cross the border and kill 150 people in Mumbai? Explain it to me.”
What a priceless gift to his dear friend Modi and every enemy of our beleaguered country! And would this not have put Achakzai’s undigested fare into a convulsion of joy? How assiduously he has worked on stupid Nawaz Sharif, and how willing this goat has become. Let the enemy, any enemy, pat him on the hind quarters and he is guaranteed to grunt in joyous expectation and widened legs. And how bravely he comports himself? And why shouldn’t he?
After all he and Zardari and their cohorts took all of ten years of daylight robbery to bring the country to its knees, while the generals, the sentinels of our national security looked benignly on, looking east for the enemy to make a break the skyline, while the enemy was in their very midst all the while, preparing the lamb for the final slaughter! And they then kept looking at Zardari to play his vaunted “Sind Card” while he was playing it continuously right under their very noses, by making Sindh virtually ungovernable because of the loot and plunder being visited on this most unfortunate province.
In the war against terrorists the army did a mighty fine job till the terrorists escaped to the interior of Punjab and Sindh, and the army was prevented from pursuing them there. Had these operations gone their logical way, the nexus between looted wealth, terrorists, and the politicians would, have been exposed and broken. War against terrorists, who are enemies of the state, was thus impeded and thwarted by the Zardari/ N.S duo.
This was tantamount to abetment of the enemy, and thus an act of treason, Zardari and N.S should have been tried for treason, but it was the generals who changed direction and slinked away.
All these last few years, those holding the highest offices in the land were subjecting the state to mortal blows. And this happened without let or hindrance from those who are the de facto guardians of the state! Nawaz Sharif’s treachery became ever more evident with the passage of time. Kashmir suffered a blood letting more gruesome in the last two years than it had done in seventy earlier years combined. But Nawaz Sharif did not open his mouth.
Modi invited him to his inauguration, letting him know that the invitation would be cancelled if he planned to meet Kashmiri leadership in India, and this traitorous oaf was only too glad to accept the invitation on these terms. When Pakistan was absolutely isolated and we got a trump card in the shape of Kulbushan Yadav, Nawaz Sharif just refused to play this gift card. And his business interests in India, though kept under wraps, are not denied by those in the know.
On top of all this came the Dawn Leaks, of which his latest remonstrance is but a mere confirmation. Dawn leaks quite plainly declared that though his government wanted to go full tilt against the terrorists, his army would not let him proceed. He confirmed the narrative of the enemy. There was no doubt about it.
The Official Secrets Act should have been immediately applied to him, but again the generals let him off. But of this we at least now know the reason i.e Generalissimo Raheel Sharif so badly wanted the rank of Field Marshal that the promise of the same became the carrot that held his gleeful focus, while Nawaz Sharif was let off.
In the end however, though the rank of Field Marshal escaped him, the General gratefully accepted an NOC in its stead, and went away to Saudi Arabia to do the sword dance. The pill was also sweetened by a hundred acres of land, which he will probably have to hand back.
For months now Nawaz Sharif has been on an unending abusive assault on the Judiciary and the Pakistan Army. But all he was faced with was restraint. No matter how high minded the reasons for the Judiciary’s restraint may have been, it has largely been a disaster. The moment Nawaz Sharif opened his mouth on G.T on his return from the PM’s quarters to Jati Umra, a foot should have been put into it.
Too much space has since been ceded to the enemy. Too much money has been looted since. Both the Punjab bureaucracy and its police, though in a state of craven wear even then, has been torn into further shreds. The whole country has become more polarized and destabilized each passing day. Abuse of the Judiciary and the Army has become rife at a time that the army is still deployed in a life or death struggle in which the country finds itself—hemmed in from without and imploding and sold out from within.
Thus, for his latest outburst, Nawaz Sharif should finally be tried under the Official Secrets Act. But he should be charged or indicted for his latest crime against the state only AFTER the verdicts of his corruption cases have been handed in. And this, because treason, treasonous utterings, and treasonous behavior has become so commonplace in our country, that it is considered just a political misdemeanour by our “liberal’ intellectuals. Thus a conviction for treason is apt to be considered an exoneration by them.
Thus, for the moment it would be quite enough for Gen Bajwa to send to Nawaz Sharif just a stiff warning. The power of a firm word from the right quarters can have amazingly curative effects. And this ought to have been done much earlier. The Pakistan of today has been made utterly dis-functional.
This is so because the executive is standing squarely against the state. This has not happened before in history, and this is nowhere more forcefully symbolised than by the continual insistence of our spineless specimen of a Prime Minister, that he is in fact not the Prime Minister of the country, but that the thug who was caught out and cashiered, still remains so.
There is much good that the judges of our Supreme Court have done. For this they shall be lauded and remembered. But I am afraid that they shall be remembered more for not reading the seriousness of the situation Pakistan is in. Pakistan has been looted into bankruptcy by the executive that is standing against the state. Nothing demands imposition of emergency rule more urgently than this situation.
It is well understood that the relevant articles of the constitution for the imposition of emergency can only be invoked by the executive which is diligently involved in undermining the state. If anything, it is this situation that should have demanded suo moto action by the judges because this has put the country in a do or die situation.
It was for the judiciary to have rescued the constitution from the evil powers holding it hostage. But the judiciary has failed in this instance and all it has tried to do to ameliorate the lot of the broken people of an unfortunate land will not make up for this capital failure.
The wages of prevarication both at the hands of the Judiciary and the Army have indeed been steep. A state and its people needing immediate and effective assistance were fed on a diet of hesitation and irresolution. The days ahead will be days of fire and fury. They will be days of raging inflation which will destabilize every institution, and each nook and every corner of the country. This inflation will be the direct result of the robbery this country has been subjected to. It will destabilize the army, which is the country’s only real ballast. And when this institution begins to rock, the country will shatter.
Justice Saqib Nisar and Gen Bajwa should separately invite to their respective tables a broad range of economists, both the bought and the unbought ones. And let them ask these luminaries to give their take on the spiral of inflation forming just beyond the immediate present. And let them then give their projected figures for the next year and then the year after that and then of ten years into the future. I promise them that the effects of the figures they get will be stunning.
They will be so stunning in fact that this is the first time they will realise that the likes of Zardari and Nawaz Sharif and their theft of Pakistan’s funds, has prepared and laid the explosives deep in the foundations of the country, and all that is now left is the final lighting of the fuze to send all our dreams spiraling into the air. To moderate the inflation that is coming, it is vital therefore that the stolen wealth be brought back to the country and reinvested.
Thus, retrieving the country’s stolen assets is not just a matter of revenge on the thieves. It is a matter of the very survival of the state. It is tragic irony indeed that Nawaz Sharif, the thug who has done most to bring the country to the brink of disaster, can openly back the narrative of the enemy, and do so with such brazen dare. This can only happen in a country where the countervailing force has either given up the ghost, or blissfully ignorant, it is grazing on the verdant golf courses of a parched and ravished Pakistan.