June issue 2016

The floodgates were opened by the Panama Papers leaks and Chief of Army Staff Raheel Sharif came barging through. The army chief gave a speech in which he said it would be impossible to defeat militancy until there was “across-the-board accountability” for those involved in corruption. The military responded by sacrificing some of its own and others followed suit. There was a major raid in Balochistan and in Sindh the government got taken to task for minting money while children in Thar died, by a committee it had appointed.

As a political issue, corruption is being used by the PTI as a weapon with which to beat the PML-N. The party’s own experiences in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, however, show it is not the bright-haired boy it likes to portray itself as. The PML-N, on the backfoot and with its prime minister implicated, wouldn’t want too much scrutiny of its own record.

This is the situation in the Pakistan of today: everyone adopts a holier-than-thou attitude and everyone is dirty. We are at the mercy of the Robber Raj and they cannot be trusted to police themselves.

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