Another arrest

Khursheed Shah joins a long list of politicians facing graft allegation

Senior PPP leader Khursheed Shah has been nabbed, and another politician from Sindh is possibly the next to go in NAB custody. Shah joins a long list of politicians facing graft allegation, including former president Asif Ali Zardari, former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and former chief minister Shehbaz Sharif, besides Maryam Nawaz, Faryal Talpur, Agha Siraj Durrani, Hamza Shehbaz, Miftah Ismail and others. Shah, meanwhile, is accused by NAB of having benami properties in the names of his frontmen or servants and getting an amenity plot in a housing society. In July this year, the NAB chairman had approved nine inquiries against different personalities, including Shah. It then took some two months for the senior politician from Sukkur to be taken into custody during a raid on his Islamabad residence.

Shah’s arrest has raised the charge of political victimisation from the PPP leaders, including party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who accused the government of using NAB to “hide its own failures”. Bilawal also described the arrest as an attempt by the government to sabotage the unity among political parties over Kashmir and to divert attention from its “failure” over the matter. Bilawal may well be saying what he is supposed to say in such a situation. But there is little denying that if not all, most of those in NAB custody or under NAB investigation belong to the main opposition parties – the PML-N and the PPP. And this is what raises serious questions over the claims of an across-the-board accountability. The opposition-only list of those nabbed has even drawn concerns from the Chief Justice of Pakistan, who has recently warned against the growing perception about a “lopsided process of accountability” and called for urgent remedial measures to save it from losing credibility. 

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2019.

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