Global Watch: From Saaf Pani To Toshakhana, Pak Military’s Expanding Shadow Over Courts |
Global Watch: From Saaf Pani To Toshakhana, Pak Military’s Expanding Shadow Over Courts
The Saaf Pani and Toshakhana cases are not simply legal stories but windows into Pakistan’s evolving political order where justice is not blind, but carefully tailored
In functioning democracies, corruption trials are meant to demonstrate the neutrality of institutions. But in Pakistan, they increasingly reveal the opposite, with selective justice being used as an instrument of political management.
The contrast between two most prominent corruption cases of Pakistan, involving relatives of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in one and former premier Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, in other, lays bare how the country’s courts and state agencies function within a deeply partisan system shaped by military power.
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The disparity goes beyond legal interpretation of the facts of these cases and reflects a political order where accountability institutions, prosecutors, and now the judiciary have been calibrated to reward compliance with the military establishment and punish dissent against it.
On May 7, an anti-corruption court in Lahore discharged Rabia Imran and Ali Imran Yousaf, the daughter and son-in-law of PM Shehbaz Sharif, in a decade-old corruption case connected to the Punjab Saaf Pani Company, a public-sector initiative established to install water filtration plants across Punjab province. Special Anti-Corruption Court (ACC) Judge Javed Iqbal Warraich ruled that neither the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), Pakistan’s premier anti-corruption body, which has been described as a tool of military establishment, nor the provincial Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE) had produced any evidence that could link the couple to financial irregularities.
Ordinarily, such acquittals would be considered unremarkable. But in the case of Pakistan, procedure itself tells the story. And in this instance, the court moved to discharge the couple in a single hearing with such remarkable speed for a system which has been notorious for procedural delays, endless........