AFTER a year spent deflecting questions from the media and stonewalling the authorities, there is some light in the Toshakhana case. On Wednesday, PTI chief Imran Khan submitted a reply to the Election Commission of Pakistan wherein he conceded he had sold at least four precious gifts he had received while he was prime minister. According to him, he had procured the items from the state treasury on payment of Rs21.56m and their sale had fetched him around Rs58m. As per Toshakhana rules, any gift assessed to be worth less than Rs30,000 can be retained without any payment to the exchequer. The former premier in his response to the ECP maintained that from July 2018 till Dec 31, 2021 he received a total of 58 gifts, out of which he paid for 14. Mr Khan’s lawyer has urged the ECP bench to quash the case on grounds of it being based on “political motives”.

Politics is indeed being played over the Toshakhana, once a little-known department where gifts from foreign dignitaries to government officials, bureaucrats, etc are stored. Consider the rather gimmicky move by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to put on display the gifts he received on his official trips to Saudi Arabia and the UAE this year and the government notification stating he does not wish to retain any of them. The objective of this ‘transparency’ is clearly to draw a stark contrast with his predecessor’s cageyness over the issue. Mr Khan should have paid heed to the adage, ‘people in glass houses should not throw stones’. After all, his government had filed references against Asif Ali Zardari, Yousuf Raza Gilani and Nawaz Sharif for allegedly abusing the Toshakhana rules in relation to some gifted luxury vehicles. But last September when the Pakistan Information Commission sought details of the gifts presented to Mr Khan, then prime minister, his government refused, claiming implausibly that such disclosure would damage international ties. That gave rise to speculation and then, when the coalition government came to power, to outright allegations about irregularities in the handling of the gifts. Certainly, as Fawad Chaudhry said in his party leader’s defence, “selling one’s own assets is not a crime”, but it is well known that undervaluing of precious items in the Toshakhana is far from uncommon and affords the recipient an extraordinary financial advantage. That is not good optics for a party leader claiming to be a man of the people.

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2022