ALL over the world, where it concerns matters of the law, the rule usually goes that what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. Not so in Pakistan, where the powerful have the option of simply rewriting their own laws whenever it becomes inconvenient for them to be applied without prejudice. Almost a year after the PDM government made sweeping changes to the NAB Ordinance to protect its own from the accountability watchdog’s often overreaching arms, it has had a change of heart. By dint of an ordinance, passed by the acting president, several key changes, made through a set of amendments last summer that had almost completely gutted the NAB law, now stand reversed. It appears that someone belatedly realised that the powers taken away from the accountability watchdog were, in fact, rather useful towards keeping ‘undesirables’ in check. After the new ordinance, the NAB chairman can once again have someone arrested even if the case against them is still in the ‘inquiry’ stage. Not only that, such a person can then be remanded to NAB custody for 30 days instead of the 14 under the amendments made last year.

This ordinance, passed in the dead of the night after the National Assembly was conveniently prorogued earlier in the day, smacks of both rank hypocrisy and malicious intent. One doesn’t need to do a lot of math to figure out who the intended target of this fresh amendment is. It may be recalled that this government, when criticised last year about the manner in which it had set about ‘fixing’ the NAB laws, had justified itself by arguing that the accountability body had traditionally been used as a tool of coercion and victimisation against politicians. Why, then, is it now weaponising NAB for precisely the same ends? It must also be asked why the government dispensed with parliamentary procedure to have the fresh amendment enforced through a presidential ordinance, especially when this same parliament had approved the amendments made last year. What reasoning could possibly justify the haste? It appears that no lesson has been learnt from the controversies that marred the 2018 elections. With all manner of pre-election engineering tricks being brought back into play, the country seems doomed to repeat a political cycle that will ultimately culminate in a fresh social crisis.

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2023