Mr Nawaz Sharif has now discovered yet another fatuous explanation for his electoral defeat last October. He says that a conspiracy was hatched by President Ishaq Khan and Ms Benazir Bhutto to discredit him in the minds of the people in connection with the unexpected death of former COAS General Asif Nawaz. Mr Sharif has pointed to President Ishaq’s speech on April 18th in which many reasons were enumerated for sacking the national assembly, including a public complaint by Mrs Nuzhat Nawaz in which she had aired suspicions about the circumstances of her husband’s death. Mrs Nuzhat had alluded to the possibility of treachery by two close aides of Mr Sharif (Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and Brigadier [retd] Imtiaz Ahmad) and demanded an autopsy to put her doubts at rest. Subsequently, says Mr Sharif, Ms Bhutto exploited the situation during the run-up to the October elections when she spoke about bringing General Nawaz’s alleged assassins to book if she became prime minister. These unfounded insinuations, argues Mr Sharif, unfairly cost him the 1993 election.
There is, of course, no denying the fact that President Ghulam Ishaq’s reference to Begum Nuzhat’s “suspicions” was unwarranted in his April 18th speech. Mr Sharif had already established a judicial commission to enquire into the “allegations”. At the very least, the matter was subjudice. The President was expected to list “facts”, not “suspicions”, which justified the ouster of the national assembly. Later, Ms Bhutto was ill-advised to try and extract mileage from Mrs Nuzhat’s tragedy, especially since caretaker prime minister Moeen Qureshi had acceded to the demand for an autopsy by foreign experts. All this is beyond contention.
But it doesn’t amount to a conspiracy of “pre-electoral rigging” by Mr Sharif’s political opponents. Consider the circumstances in which the death of General Asif Nawaz acquired a political dimension in 1993.
Mrs Nuzhat Nawaz was privy to her husband’s bitter tensions with Chaudhry Nisar and Brig Imtiaz throughout 1992. She thought him hale and hearty when he suffered a fatal heart attack in January 1993. She recalled the perfunctory attitude of the army doctors who had treated him for food poisoning in November 1992 and was nagged by doubts. By April, she was ready to go public with her misgivings and demand an autopsy. Mr Sharif responded immediately by establishing the Shafi-ur-Rahman Commission to recommend a suitable course of action. So far so good.
The Commission, however, failed to satisfy Mrs Nawaz. Far from it. It took a mere 18 working days to hear 23 testimonies and swept away her demand for an autopsy on the flimsiest of excuses: “administrative and financial restraints”. It was for the government, wrote the judges surprisingly, to determine whether and who should conduct the autopsy. Mrs Nuzhat was not even sent a copy of the Commission’s report. The judges who pooh-poohed her complaint were the same gentlemen who restored Mr Sharif to power in a controversial and unprecedented judgement which many said was legally flawed. How was the widow expected to feel?
After Mr Sharif was restored to power in May, he decided to ignore the pending demand for autopsy. After he was fired in July, he made a point of publicly distancing himself from both Chaudhry Nisar and Brig Imtiaz. What was the widow expected to think?
Fearing a “cover-up”, she launched her own private investigation. The results of “hair analysis”, which arrived in September, provided sufficient reason to repeat her demand for an autopsy. This time, however, she went ahead and lodged a formal complaint with the police, although she didn’t name names.
Mr Moeen Qureshi did what Mr Nawaz Sharif ought to have done months ago but didn’t: order an autopsy. Also, if Mr Sharif knew that his hands were clean, there was no need to treat loyal comrades-in-arms like Chaudhry Nisar and Brig Imtiaz as though they were some lepers from a forgetable past. Instead, Mr Sharif’s attitude to the “Asif Nawaz case” seemed to smack of someone who was on the defensive because he may have had something to hide. In the event, Mr Sharif was wholly responsible for his own discomfort.
It is, of course, preposterous for Mr Sharif to claim that such allegations adversely influenced the electorate. Politicians make all sorts of outrageous claims and accusations at election time, but voters seem to have minds of their own. For instance, Mr Sharif has constantly harangued Ms Bhutto as a “traitor”, which is more offensive than being alluded to as an accessory to murder. If the people have chosen to elect the “traitor” Benazir Bhutto for the second time in five years and have refused to elect Mr Shahid Nawaz (General Asif’s younger brother who fought on a PPP ticket), clearly they are not as gullible as Mr Sharif would have us believe.
The autopsy report is clear. General Asif Nawaz’s widow is satisfied. Her family never had any political axe to grind, that is why Shahid Nawaz never sought to beat his brother’s drum. Those who are now pretending to be martyrs, like Mr Nawaz Sharif, are wasting their breath. The case is closed.