One more former Prime Minister has been sentenced “for being anti-state”. This time around, a foreign minister too is convicted. A cipher from the US – which PM Imran Khan allegedly ‘lost’ after making it ‘public’ – had been at the centre of a controversial case that saw its closure in a pretty contentious way. Khan and Shah Mehmood Qureshi were handed down 10-year imprisonment each – and the PTI has vowed to challenge the convictions in high court.
The fact that the verdict seems to have been rushed just nine days ahead of the general elections and the accused were not provided with their due right to defend makes it debatable and distasteful. Moreover, the trajectory of the case proves that the government kept changing the goalposts, and went from one extreme of ‘denying the very existence’ of the diplomatic cable to accusing the PTI leadership of ‘stealing’ it in violation of the Official Secrets Act.
The PTI claims – just as some experts too – that the ‘cablegate’ proceedings were not conducted in accordance with the law and the Constitution. The party derive credence from IHC notification of declaring a jail trial as ‘erroneous’ and scrapping the entire proceedings. The proceedings were reinitiated by the special court in Adiala Jail, and were coupled with a crackdown on PTI and denial of its electoral symbol.
Notwithstanding the maintainability of the sentence at superior judicial fora, the ill-conceived and hurried prosecution has come as a blot on the decorum of justice, and has surely not met the benchmarks of credibility. Many see it as a tool of victimisation, which will further polarise the already divisive political mosaic at a time when the chips are down and national cohesion is undermined.
Khan’s conviction will be read in history on the parallels of extra-judicial extermination of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the exiling of Nawaz Sharif on the heels of similar disputable litigations. This does not bode well for democracy and national unanimity. Though one can argue that the PTI leadership tried to capitalise on the cable-leaks, at a time when it was certain to lose power, the million-dollar question is: does it merit such a harsh sentence, and that too with such impetuosity?
Published in The Express Tribune, January 31st, 2024.
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