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Another day, another judgement, another sentence. But is it really Imran Khan who is at the receiving end?
On Saturday the accountability court handed down seventeen-year sentences to the PTI founder and his wife Bushra Bibi. In the case known as Toshakhana, the prosecution argued that the former First Couple had under-invoiced a gift from the Saudi rulers, thereby inflicting a severe financial loss on the national exchequer. This fresh sentence adds to a long line of similar punishments handed down to Khan by various courts. The deeply entangled maze of his legal troubles appears unending.
Predictably so, the government trooped out various spokesmen after the Saturday sentence to heap justifications and blame Khan and his wife for landing themselves in this mess. The PTI trashed the judgement and the judge, while repeating the policy line that all cases against their leader are politically motivated.
The judgement came a day after another court slapped decade-long sentences on PTI leaders incarcerated in Kot Lakhpat jail. Their punishment is linked to involvement in the events of May 9, 2023 that saw PTI supporters ransacking military installations across the country. The sentencing of these frontline leaders like Dr Yasmin Rashid, Mehmood Ur Rasheed and others followed the 14-year sentence given to former DG ISI Lt Gen (retd) Faiz Hameed by a military court.
These rapid-fire judgements within a span of a few days, though not linked with each other in terms of their timing, do make one thing clear: for those opposed to the power matrix, the screws are tightening, and the net is widening.
But where does all this lead to?
Here’s where history throws a spanner in the works. Over the decades, our circle of crime and punishment has consistently eroded the public’s trust and confidence in the process of accountability. The PML-N, PPP, MQM and various other political parties have all been through the grinder, and come out bruised, chastened, compromised but — most importantly — alive. PTI is the latest to experience the wrong side of the stick. All have committed acts of omission and commission, and all have vowed, at various points during their dark days, that they would fix the system that accepts political persecution as an accepted part of our colonial structure.
All promised to break the cycle, only to become part of the recycle.
This recycling of persecution — call it a Ferris wheel of selective accountability — has allowed yesterday’s victims to become today’s power wielders. No one represents this cycle of punishment and reward better than the current occupant of the Presidency.
In these political peaks and troughs, the only flatliner is Pakistanis’ abysmal mistrust of the rule of law. A rotten system produces rotten outcomes. How else can you explain the prosecution basing its case against Khan in the May 9 case by arguing — with a straight face, I might add – that a policeman hiding behind a sofa in Khan’s room heard him plan the entire conspiracy. Right, then. Even those opposed to Khan have no choice but to laugh off such infantile attempts to pin a charge on him. If he is indeed responsible for the May 9 events, and if the government wants his prosecuted for it, then it really needs to produce evidence that hold up not just in the court of law but – more importantly – in the court of public opinion.
And yet, since 1947 till today, this rotten system continues to reproduce fresh rot with every incoming generation. Such rot, it appears, has become embedded in the system’s DNA. The result: even the most watertight of cases find few takers.
Which means that among an overwhelming majority of citizens, Toshakhana 1 or 2 or 3, 4, 5 — keep the numbers piling up if that helps — in all such cases, legally speaking Khan may be lacerated, but politically speaking, he remains bulletproof. This has got less to do with his guilt or innocence, and more with the shredded credibility of the criminal justice system.
This has practical bearing on three things. First, prolonging Khan’s incarceration through all and every means keeps him away from mounting a challenge to the current setup, presently. It does not however neutralise the magnitude of the challenge that he remains capable of mounting the day he steps foot outside of Adiyala. In other words, judgements and sentences are only delaying the inevitable.
Second, the colonial/post-colonial set-up responsible for the medieval state of governance and the rotten criminal justice system is growing stronger instead of evolving into a citizens-oriented and service delivery mechanism. In a weird contradiction, the more it loses credibility and faces a trust deficit from the citizenry, the more it strengthens itself by reinforcing its institutional failures. Can such contradiction persist?
Third, with all their information guns blazing, the government continues to struggle with successfully making Khan look guilty as charged. It’s a triple whammy: laughably weak prosecution, tainted judiciary and weak narrative framing — all coming together in an unenviable combination that cannot generate outcome desired by those running the system. The recycling of rot continues with institutional momentum.
It is a slow bleed, this. Eager reformers can, at best, brush rot at the fringes under the carpet, and then re-inaugurate the carpet as a new floor dressing. The core however remains as putrid as it always has. From the Bhuttos to the Sharifs and now to the Khans, all have suffered at the hands of this rotten accountability, and have benefited — yes benefited — from the shredded credibility of the rotting system.
Which is why, even though it’s another day, another judgement, and another sentence — Khan knows that in the end, he is not the one on the receiving end.
