NAB indulges in ‘post-truth’?

It is beyond comprehension how NAB chairman could have allowed himself to be duped by such falsehood

It is not a laughing matter. Normally, such blunders are corrected or clarified within a matter of hours or at least within a day or two after having re-checked the facts relevant to the blatant faux pas.

One only hopes that the NAB for the sake of its own credibility and integrity as well as that of its Chairman, Justice (retd) Javed Iqbal, would accept its blunder without further loss of time and order an enquiry into how the blunder came to be committed.

It is beyond one’s comprehension how a person of NAB chairman’s wisdom, sagacity and experience could have allowed himself to be duped by such a transparent falsehood. And it is even more incomprehensible how the NAB board made up of members well-versed in their profession could let the press release in question be issued to the media on Tuesday without first having verified the relevant facts.

One had expected that the NAB and all those responsible officers of the accountability bureau would have double-checked the facts as the accusations had concerned a thrice-elected prime minister and his alleged connections with Pakistan’s enemy number one – India.

What was more perplexing was the second press release issued to the media on Wednesday which not only did not use the opportunity to set the record right but actually tried to re-enforce the impression attempted to be created by the Tuesday press release by quoting an ‘obscure’ column written by an ‘obscure’ journalist and published in an ‘obscure’ newspaper as far back as February this year.

And more perplexing is the fact that the NAB had accepted without question the allegation levelled by the ‘obscure’ columnist of laundering nearly $5 billion of Pakistani money by the former PM to the enemy country, sourcing his story on a World Bank Report published in 2016 which had projected an assumed amount of money, which immigrants world-wide would notionally remit to their home countries. The report did not mention at all any money laundering episode in its projections.

The report was, in fact, talking about economic migrants like the ones who send to Pakistan every year some $20 billion from host countries like the UK, the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, etc. It was certainly not talking about those migrants who had abandoned their mother countries like those that had migrated to Pakistan from India. That is the reason why in the report itself the authors had clarified that the projections recorded for India-Pakistan were incorrect.

That neither the NAB chairman nor those who are supposed to process such allegations did not bother to find out how the report was received by the world media particularly that of Pakistan when it was released in 2016 is indeed puzzling.

If those in the NAB whose job it is to carry out preliminary investigations on such newspaper reports had bothered to justify their fat salaries, they would have come across the State Bank of Pakistan’s rejection of the WB report soon after it was published. More puzzling is the fact that the Wednesday press release was issued by the NAB to media even after both the SBP and the WB had debunked the Tuesday press release immediately.

And wonder of wonders the NAB chief bettered himself on Thursday by not only not accepting his blunder but by further re-enforcing the impression attempted to be created by the Tuesday press release by making an irrelevant speech. The upshot of all this has been that parts of both – the regular and the social media – have gone on an overdrive. The story which is gaining currency is that the SBP, the WB and the lifafa journalists all have come to the rescue of ‘Modi’s corrupt friend’.

This is perhaps what was intended to be achieved by those who had in the first place knowingly concocted the whole story based on a falsehood. It is not fake news but a perfect example of alternate truth or to be precise of post-truth. In this era of post-truth politics, it's easy to cherry-pick data and manufacture whatever conclusion one desires.