by Ansar Abbasi

ISLAMABAD: A whispering campaign has been unleashed by certain elements to malign Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, claiming that the car of the country’s top judge, which had narrowly missed a fatal accident in Islamabad, was being driven by his son Arsalan Iftikhar.

The gossip that has reached the media circles suggests that the registrar Supreme Court had rejected the inquiry conducted into the incident because of the Arsalan factor. The source of the gossip is said to be a few people in the government having vested interests but there is no independent verification of the source of this campaign.

However, inquiries with the concerned quarters, including some senior police officials and those who held the inquiry into the incident, totally reject this whispering campaign as baseless.

Instead, they disclosed that the chief justice was not even in his own official car but was travelling in the Punjab government’s limousine, driven by the provincial government’s official driver Niaz. The said driver was awarded Rs 100,000 for evading the accident.

The inquiry report, disapproved by Registrar Supreme Court Dr Faquir Husain, interestingly did not mention any such thing. There were dozens of eyewitnesses, including members of the chief justice’s security officials and members of his motorcade, and none ever raised this point.

Apparently, this baseless campaign is aimed at maligning the chief justice, who is pursuing cases of massive corruption, loot and plunder. These cases also pertain to several key players of the present government. A few people in the government having vested interests are blamed to be the authors of this campaign and are reportedly also planting the information to the media.

According to one journalist, who shared this baseless gossip with this correspondent, he heard quite a few journalists discussing it during a press conference of a federal minister just a few days back.

The chief justice, who is the darling of the people, is seen as the only hope by all and sundry at a time when the government has become totally indifferent towards the cries of the people. The CJ not only has fixed those who plundered Rs 9 billion of depositors’ money in the BoP scam that had also exposed some big names, including a key federal minister, took suo moto notice of the loot and plunder in Pakistan Steels, got cancelled some controversial allotments of Sindh state-lands on throwaway prices, summoned the bank record of all those powerful and mighty who got billions and billions of their loans written off since 1971 and sought from the Punjab government record of land allotments made during five years but is also presently seized with the NRO case that has made even several influential rulers unnerved.

It is feared that the recent accident of the CJ’s motorcade could be a conspiracy to harm this national hero. The inquiry committee, constituted by the Interior Ministry, which submitted its findings to the government of late, however, does not see any conspiracy behind the accident.

It rather concluded that the accident took place because of the negligence of the traffic police. However, Registrar Supreme Court Dr Faquir Husain has expressed dissatisfaction with the report, which in his view was deficient on different accounts.

In his response to the government, which led to the ordering of a judicial inquiry by the prime minister, Dr Faquir did not buy how could the Islamabad Traffic Police block the CJ’s motorcade at the eleventh hour of its arrival at the site of the accident, when they were duly informed of the CJ’s arrival schedule four hours in advance.