LAHORE - Since the announcement of the Supreme Court judgment on Panama leaks, Punjab Law Minister Rana Sana Ullah has been busy consulting dictionaries to find out the real meaning of the word, ‘fortune’.
This was so because the law minister had a serious objection to the reference Justice Asif Saeed Khosa had made in his dissenting note quoting from Mario Puzo’s novel that “Behind every great fortune, there lies a great crime”.
“I am an Urdu medium and an ordinary student of law. And yet I have consulted a number of dictionaries to know the real sense of the word, “fortune”. In my humble opinion, it means “Khushbakhti” (good fortune)”, the minister told the media outside Punjab Assembly yesterday.
According to him, the Panama case was, in fact, a case of fortune smiling on the Sharif family rather than what the honorable judge had stated in his opening lines of his dissenting judgment. “It would have been better had the honorable Judge started writing his judgment with a quote from the holy Quran or Sunnah,” he averred.
Rana also went on to say that courts were giving judgments under duress. Here, he was indirectly criticising the actual judgment delivered by the three judges. He substantiated his point by saying that first the court had rejected the same petition on Panama as being non-maintainable; and then accepted the same for hearing only to rule that prime minister and his family should be investigated by a JIT.
Nonetheless, the minister did not dare say a word about who was influencing the court decisions from behind the scene. He also did not find anything offensive or objectionable in ISPR’s statement assuring the Supreme Court of army’s full support to conclude the Panama case.
The minister minced no words in demeaning the proposed JIT and the final verdict to be given by the apex court on its recommendations. He declared that Panama case would be decided in 2018 elections as it was a political issue having nothing to do with law or morality.
The law minister took no caution while uttering these remarks about one of the dissenting judge and those who supported investigation by a JIT in the majority judgment. In his outburst against the honorable judges, Rana Sana did not realise that he was saying something inflammatory giving hostages to fortunes.
Inside the House, the law minister later moved a resolution which ended with a bizarre punch line suggesting that all political forces should lay their entire focus on the 2018 elections, so that the prime minister could spend his energies on country’s development with a peace of mind. It is naive of him to think that opposition parties would forget about the Panama case at this stage and go to electioneering taking up other issues.