Dr Asif Zardari’s lawyers have at last admitted that the multi-million dollar Rockwood Estate or “Surrey Palace” in the UK belongs to their client. They say the money from the sale of this property should go to Mr Zardari. Understandably, neither Mr Zardari nor Benazir Bhutto, nor indeed any of their busybody spokespersons, has denied this new twist in the facts. But we recall the days nearly a decade ago when Ms Bhutto, as prime minister of Pakistan, defiantly stood up in parliament to deny that she or her husband knew anything about the Surrey Palace, let alone have any financial stake in it. Such staunch denials were religiously flagged by the routine remark that “we don’t care who sells it to whom”. But now they desperately do.
The government has long alleged that Mr Zardari and Ms Bhutto were partners in “plundering” Pakistan and stashing their “loot” abroad via front companies and lawyers. There are several ongoing corruption cases in Pakistan against the couple. A case involving illegal kickbacks and commissions is also pending against them in Switzerland. At first, they ignored it on the grounds that they were not involved. Later, after receiving a suspended six-month jail sentence, they decided to contest the judgment.
This acknowledgement raises an important question whose answer affects the nature and scope of politics in Pakistan. Will it have an adverse impact on the other corruption cases against them and dent their personal and party reputations, credibility or popularity among their supporters at home and abroad?
The answer, regrettably, is “no”. Corruption is no longer a critical or even important issue in Pakistani politics. When anyone who’s anyone in government and opposition is perceived to be more or less “corrupt” – corruption having acquired a meaning beyond the purely illegal monetary context and come to imply many other illegal, bad and hypocritical actions like electoral rigging, institutional unaccountability, constitutional deviation, etc., — then “corruption” loses its sting and becomes a flaccid non-issue. This is how the graph of “corruption” has risen and fallen.
Ms Bhutto’s first government was widely perceived as corrupt. That is when Mr Zardari acquired the soubriquet of Mr Ten Percent. When her government was sacked, it was the most credible charge against her. Soon, however, Nawaz Sharif was also enmeshed in similar charges (motorway kickbacks, loan defaults, industrial empire building, plot scams, etc). Then Ms Bhutto won a second term and again succumbed to the lure of the lucre. The Surrey Palace scandal broke, followed by others in which commissions and kickbacks were prominently highlighted. “Corruption” became such a big-time media issue that both the ruling PPP and the PMLN opposition were compelled to float committees and bills against it in parliament. That is the time when Mr Imran Khan launched his political career as an urban “anti-corruption crusader” and Transparency International awarded Pakistan the dubious honour of being the second most corrupt country in the world after Nigeria. When Ms Bhutto was sacked in 1996, her government had plumbed to the lowest depths of popular alienation and disillusionment.
Interestingly, though, “corruption” was still far from becoming a clinching issue with the rural masses. Party machines, organisation, group loyalty, money, local politics and critical state-establishment backing mattered more. That is why Imran Khan lost his electoral deposit in the 1997 elections and Nawaz Sharif romped home with a two-thirds majority in parliament. In later years, notions of “corruption” were corrupted by Mr Sharif when his “accountability commission” under the corrupt loan defaulter, Saif ur Rehman, became a synonym for “victimisation”, political opportunism and repression. The same fate befell General Musharraf’s NAB after it excluded the military establishment from its ambit and later became a weapon in the hands of the junta to make and break political groups and parties. The net result of the withering away of corruption as a political issue was evident in the pre-poll rigged 2002 elections in which the “corrupt” PPP still received the largest number of votes of any party in the country. The concept of corruption was finally trashed when the “corrupt” Mr Zardari couldn’t be convicted for corruption in a corrupt political system run by a corrupt establishment and he was transformed into a martyr by his seven-year prison term without a conviction. No wonder then that he has had the audacity to openly claim rights to the Surrey Palace today. Even the idle chattering classes are not amused by such news any more.
The next general elections should bear out this conclusion. If General Musharraf were to accept the assumption that the final accountability commission in Pakistan is the court of the untutored and unwashed masses of Pakistan rather than the self-righteous military establishment-admittedly a rather heroic assumption – the pious MMA will be whittled down to size and the wretched Peoples Party and PMLN under their “corrupt leaders” will win hands down. That is why a process of national reconciliation is the need of the hour rather than hypocritical finger-pointing at one another in the hamaam.