September 10, 2016
Bad bargain
The plea bargain is routinely used in many countries as a way to quickly settle cases in a clogged judicial system or to provide relief to an accused in return for their testimony in snaring bigger fish. Only in Pakistan is it specifically designed as a way to whitewash the crimes of public servants and others. The Supreme Court, in a suo motu case, is looking into the constitutionality of plea bargain and voluntary return schemes used by the National Accountability Bureau and its impression is that these schemes violate the constitution. In practice, what NAB tends to do in the case of voluntary return, when corrupt officials willingly return even a portion of the money they stole, is give them a pardon and allow them to resume their jobs. The business and industrial elite use these schemes to avoid prosecution while paying only a fraction of the amount stolen, and that too usually in instalments. In the case of plea bargains, investigations have already been initiated when the government offers a deal for the accused to pay back all the money they stole in return for having criminal charges dropped. With voluntary return, the NAB chairman has the sole authority to release criminal liability for the person returning the money, while under the plea bargain scheme the deal must be approved by the courts, which usually act as a rubber stamp.
There are many reasons why both schemes should be abolished. First, there is the fact that the right to a plea bargain is not available to most Pakistani citizens. It was only introduced in the National Accountability Ordinance of 1999 and can only be offered by NAB. If plea bargains are such a great deal for the state then why are they not extended to the rest of the population? The answer is implicit in the question. Plea bargains and voluntary returns are used to pad accounts and tout success in retrieving stolen money while the corrupt escape real punishment. That NAB keeps details of plea bargains secret from the public shows just how little scrutiny these deals can bear. This quid pro quo makes a mockery of justice and allows NAB to play by its own rules. As the Supreme Court observed, this only ends up encouraging more corruption. Corrupt officials pay only a fraction of the amount they have looted since NAB is usually unwilling to expend the resources to fully investigate cases and determine the full amount that was stolen. With their public benefit so minimal, it is time to do away with schemes that seem to have been created to keep the corrupt out of prison. The government should also look at the tendency to offer inducements as a way of preventing criminality. This extends beyond voluntary return and plea bargain to include the various tax amnesty schemes that are regularly proposed. Until enforcement is beefed up, such ways of recovering looted wealth will either be ignored or used to whitewash dirty money.
Not surprising
As the first by-election to be conducted after the sidelining of Altaf Hussain by MQM-Pakistan, the polls for PS-127, a Sindh Assembly seat which covers Malir, was always going to be seen as a referendum on the state of the party. That the MQM candidate Waseem Ahmed lost the seat to the PPP’s Murtaza Baloch – and that too by a margin of nearly 7,000 votes after the party had held the seat for 12 years – would not seem to augur well for the MQM’s future. But such elections tend to hinge more on local issues and structural factors like ethnic make-up and the rural-urban divide than a party’s national standing and it would be advisable to start there when analysing the cause of the MQM’s defeat. PS-127 can be divided into two halves – the urban Malir Cantonment, Malir Extension Colony and its surroundings, and the rural villages of Gadap Town where the population is mostly ethnic Baloch and Sindhi. The former has always been dominated by the MQM and the latter by the PPP. The PPP was able to prevail by turning out more voters from its areas than the MQM managed in their areas of influence.
That the PPP was able to play the turnout game better than the MQM was hardly surprising as it had been laying the groundwork for retaking seats it had lost to the MQM for more than a year. In March 2015, the provincial PPP government fulfilled a longstanding demand of rural residents and revived the District Council Karachi, which gave the rural areas of Malir and other districts their own separate local bodies representation. By taking the rural areas of Malir out of the hands of the Malir District Municipal Corporation, the PPP earned itself the gratitude of its residents. It was further helped by the poor performance of the PTI, which theoretically should appeal to the same voters as the PPP but is in disarray in Karachi. The MQM, meanwhile, suffered low turnout in its areas as it found itself involved in, or facing, clashes with the MQM-Haqiqi. It has alleged that Haqiqi men were working in cahoots with the PPP to disrupt the process for the MQM and that the police made the task easy for them. The MQM was also not helped by the Pak Sarzameen Party – which was not on the ticket but spurred the by-election when the constituency MPA Ashfaq Ahmed Mangi defected to them – decided to hold a large anti-MQM rally with Mustafa Kamal. In the national narrative, though, all these factors will be cast aside to portray the MQM as facing an existential crisis and the potential loss of its Karachi stronghold. The problem for the MQM is that such impressions, even if mistaken, can quickly take hold and become reality. It will have to get its electoral game back in order to quiet the negative headlines.