Accountability for all
Arrest of a sole govt member is not going to put the reservations of selective accountability to rest
Provincial minister and senior PTI leader Aleem Khan has been taken into custody by NAB. Under question is the financial uprightness of the senior politician, who is imputed by opponents as the ATM of Imran Khan and his PTI.
Aleem faces multiple allegations: of accumulating assets beyond his known sources of income; of owning offshore companies in Britain and the UAE; and of fraud in housing societies. Aleem’s failure to satisfy NAB about the money trail to his assets during a two-hour-long questioning yesterday led to his arrest for further interrogation, according to reports.
Aleem is the only representative of the PTI-led coalition government to have gone into NAB custody. Others, including Babar Awan; Mahmood Khan, the K-P CM; Azam Khan, the PM’s principal secretary; and Chaudhry brothers; have only been summoned by NAB for questioning.
So thus far, the situation was fit enough for the opposition — the PML-N and the PPP in particular — to call the accountability drive discriminatory.
But Aleem’s arrest and his subsequent resignation as Punjab’s local government minister has provided room for the government to hit back at what it calls the opposition’s bickering of one-sided accountability.
Coming out aloud, Federal Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry claims credit for an ‘impartial’ accountability process, saying, “…it tells a lot about prevailing culture in PTI and other political parties.”
Till hours after Aleem’s arrest, a reaction from the opposition remained awaited, with the information minister saying that they were dumbstruck, finding it “difficult to come up with further criticism [against NAB and the government]”.
That the process of accountability in our country has always been opposition-intended and void of fairness and impartiality merits no debate. To quote a few instances, Nawaz Sharif’s Ehtesab Bureau of the 90s was solely aimed at bringing the PPP to book; and the wrath of the same Ehtesab Bureau, renamed NAB in the Musharraf era, invested all its energies into finding a culprit in the PML-N.
In the current case, the arrest of a sole government member is not going to put the reservations of selective accountability to rest.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 7th, 2019.
Aleem faces multiple allegations: of accumulating assets beyond his known sources of income; of owning offshore companies in Britain and the UAE; and of fraud in housing societies. Aleem’s failure to satisfy NAB about the money trail to his assets during a two-hour-long questioning yesterday led to his arrest for further interrogation, according to reports.
Aleem is the only representative of the PTI-led coalition government to have gone into NAB custody. Others, including Babar Awan; Mahmood Khan, the K-P CM; Azam Khan, the PM’s principal secretary; and Chaudhry brothers; have only been summoned by NAB for questioning.
So thus far, the situation was fit enough for the opposition — the PML-N and the PPP in particular — to call the accountability drive discriminatory.
But Aleem’s arrest and his subsequent resignation as Punjab’s local government minister has provided room for the government to hit back at what it calls the opposition’s bickering of one-sided accountability.
Coming out aloud, Federal Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry claims credit for an ‘impartial’ accountability process, saying, “…it tells a lot about prevailing culture in PTI and other political parties.”
Till hours after Aleem’s arrest, a reaction from the opposition remained awaited, with the information minister saying that they were dumbstruck, finding it “difficult to come up with further criticism [against NAB and the government]”.
That the process of accountability in our country has always been opposition-intended and void of fairness and impartiality merits no debate. To quote a few instances, Nawaz Sharif’s Ehtesab Bureau of the 90s was solely aimed at bringing the PPP to book; and the wrath of the same Ehtesab Bureau, renamed NAB in the Musharraf era, invested all its energies into finding a culprit in the PML-N.
In the current case, the arrest of a sole government member is not going to put the reservations of selective accountability to rest.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 7th, 2019.