Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif arrived in parliament on Monday with a great cloud of questions hanging over his head, not least of which were the seven questions that the combined opposition had wanted him to answer.
He left answering few of them except perhaps the most immediate — there will be a parliamentary committee consisting of both government and opposition members who will draw up mutually acceptable terms of reference for a judicial commission to investigate the disclosures in the Panama Papers, and presumably other revelations since.
While it was the third time Sharif has addressed the Panama Papers issue directly — two earlier addresses to the nation clarified little — it was still an uneven performance.
At various points in his speech, the prime minister’s delivery suggested a nervousness at odds with the defiant content. Underwhelming too was the business and financial history that Sharif narrated.
While the sums quoted by him were not insignificant, they certainly appear far from the enormous wealth that the prime minister and his family are widely perceived to have.
The speech and the opposition’s response — a walkout that appeared to agitate the PML-N leadership — suggest though that consensus on the scope and powers of the judicial commission will be difficult to achieve.
Sharif appeared to lay down a marker that all those incriminated in the Panama Papers should be equally and simultaneously investigated. Indeed, from the prime minister’s tone it seemed that he expects some of his rivals to be found guilty of the financial misdeeds that they have accused his family of.
Meanwhile, from opposition leader Khursheed Shah’s brief comments it appeared that the opposition is determined to keep the focus on the prime minister and the first family.
Much may ultimately depend on how those differences are reconciled. For now, the opposition ought to consider that, setting aside all the rhetoric and political posturing, the prime minister has consistently maintained that he is willing to be scrutinized by whatever commission the opposition sees fit. There is, at least, no attempt by Sharif to reject fresh scrutiny.
Where the PML-N is doing a disservice to itself and politics is its attempt to link the Panama issue to conspiracies to hold the country back developmentally.
While Sharif alluded to it in his speech, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar was more direct and insistent in his own speech after the opposition walkout.
That the machinery of the government has ground to a virtual standstill since the Panama Papers first cast a shadow on the prime minister is an indictment of the government, not the opposition or unnamed conspirators.
Consider that the finance minister himself, instead of being immersed in the details of the upcoming budget, is spending a great deal of time acting as the government’s chief political fire-fighter.
