Controversy of the year

As Maryam Nawaz initiated a row against Judge Arshad Malik with a questionable video

It seems there is an unintentional blueprint to how politics unfolds in Pakistan. Every year there is one controversy that ends up dictating the news cycle for months and by doing so, ends up defining the year in terms of politics as a whole. More often than not, it is suffixed by that overused and worn-out cliché of journalism — ‘gate’. Where we once had ‘Memogate’, in 2019 we have ‘Videogate’.

This new saga in development began with what PML-N leader Maryam Nawaz promised would be an ‘epoch-making’ news conference — politics in our country is hyped with the sort of fanfare movies and TV series are marketed with elsewhere. Epoch-making or not, Maryam did drive talking heads into frenzy when she played video before journalists in attendance that allegedly showed judge Arshad Malik admitting that he was coerced into passing judgments against Nawaz Sharif in the Al-Azizia case. Before anyone outside of the presser had even seen it, a chorus demanding a forensic audit of the video gathered on both sets of parliament benches.

The plot thickened, however, when the judge countered Maryam’s claims with accusations of his own. Decrying the video as a “despicable attempt to mesh together various instances and present them out of context”, the judge admitted that some individuals had tried to coerce him but only to get him to pass a verdict in Sharif’s favour. One of these individuals, the judge revealed later in an affidavit submitted to the Islamabad High Court, was Sharif’s son Hussain Nawaz.

Meanwhile, Maryam, far from being quiet, claimed to have more videos from where the one that kicked off the controversy came from. And PM Imran Khan, obviously not content with sitting idle in the pavilion, stepped onto the field as well, tweeting about a ‘Pakistani mafia’ that like its Sicilian counterpart, uses “bribes, threat, blackmail and begging to pressurise institutions to protect its billions stashed abroad.” With the matter now in the Supreme Court, all the lay citizen in Pakistan can do is heat up the popcorn and wait. The year may disappoint on many fronts, but the controversy is sure to grow juicier in terms of news as it moves along.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 14^th, 2019.

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