Khawaja Asif’s arrest

NAB says that the total assets held by Khawaja Asif swelled from Rs5.1 million in 1991 to Rs221 million in 2018

Former foreign and defence minister Khawaja Asif has formally joined the sizeable ranks of PML-N leaders and associates who have been under NAB probe over questionable wealth. Some of them are languishing in jails while others have been freed on bail after detentions spanning more than a year, in some cases. Asif was arrested — kidnapped, according to Maryam Nawaz — by a NAB team on Tuesday evening after he had come out of an important party meeting in Lahore convened to discuss the future line of action regarding the combined opposition’s anti-government movement.

NAB says that the total assets held by Khawaja Asif swelled from Rs5.1 million in 1991, when he was elected senator, to Rs221 million in 2018, and he needs to justify his ballooning income by providing the source of earning. Public representatives should have their each and every penny accounted for, and there should be no compromise on that. But we have seen many opposition leaders being kept in NAB custody only to be bailed after long periods, without their assets-beyond-means cases reaching a logical conclusion. There are instances where even the filing of a corruption reference with the accountability court has taken months. Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Maryam Nawaz are exceptions in that they both stand convicted over corruption, but their cases too are far from concluded, currently going through the appeals stage in superior courts.

While the low conviction from accountability courts may be attributed to weak prosecution, the opposition claims that the hollow grounds could never have ended in convictions and alleges that the long imprisonments are mere tools of political engineering. Interestingly, the opposition also finds some significant takers, the honourable Supreme Court judges, for these particular grievances of theirs.

Meanwhile, Khawaja Asif’s arrest has dimmed the hopes of a grand national dialogue any time soon. It will rather add to the prevailing political tension — given the government’s hardening stance that the opposition is a cabal of looters which deserves no pardon, and the opposition’s certitude that the arrest is a part of the government’s political victimisation campaign.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 31^st, 2020.

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