Self-accountability-the Decontamination Process
The final accountability being that rendered by the masses at the polls, should not the public expect the political parties to themselves filter their candidates through a pre-electoral weeding process to ensure that they pass measure at various levels leading to the anvil of the Ehtasab (Accountability) Ordinance? The recurrent failure to carry out accountability has brought a once vibrant economic engine fuelled by a dynamic people resplendent in hope to its knees, the last three years at the hands of a band of looters who would put vultures to shame. Not that any thief has ever accepted guilt (to quote renowned columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee “which thief will give you a receipt?”) without being faced by incontrovertible evidence but seldom has there been such highway robbery and then a brazen display of shameless feigning of benign innocence as by the members of the universally unlamented late government of Ms Benazir Bhutto. Unfortunately that is their benign right under the laws of the land unless they are brought to justice.
We have to studiously guard against a rush of judgment. As columnists and journalists, except for investigative journalists like Ardeshir Cowasjee, Kamran Khan, Kaleem Omar, etc we have seldom access to hard evidence, we simply articulate the mass perception. In doing so we fall into the Catch-22 trap of kangaroo courts insofar as we mix truths and half truths that feed on each other mixing these such that the palate of the population becomes anxious and hungry to apportion blame. A responsibility devolves upon us to verify the accuracy of what we put down in print, more so because in our haste to lay accusations and see the looters brought to justice we may be unknowingly playing into their hands because hastily levelled accusations run the risk of being shown to be without depth and substance, it is more difficult to cast doubt on hard evidence obtained more deliberately. Some of us are also guilty of letting our own personal bitterness and frustrations get the better of our own judgment, in effect we attempt to project as the truth what we would like to believe is the truth.
