Never underestimate the power of fonts. *
That is one major message in the 5-0 verdict of Pakistan’s Supreme Court to unseat Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the Panama Papers-related corruption case.
Some of you may know about how a font did Sharif in. Let me explain nevertheless. Key documents, which the Sharif family cited in their defense against the allegations of having acquired apartments in London using unaccounted wealth, were typed in the Calibri font created by Microsoft. In a brilliant bit of font forensics it was established by the prosecutors that while the purportedly 2006 documents claiming that Sharif’s daughter Maryam was only a trustee of the companies that bought the London properties were typed in Calibri which was created in 2007.
How was it that the documents used a font that did not exist was the million rupee question. Unless Microsoft gave the Sharif family a BETA version of Calibri—and I am being absurdly sarcastic—how did the documents use that font? This bit of finding was said to have significantly unraveled the case for the Sharif family.
I am struck by how information technology has so completely globalized the world. The Panama Papers and their leak was a classic example of a confluence of technologies whose repercussions were felt worldwide because they uncovered unaccounted wealth possessed by political elites across the world. I seriously doubt if the Sharifs would have ever anticipated that their hidden wealth would be uncovered because of the Internet.
In the end, Calibri pushed the case in a corner where the five Supreme Court judges had little option but to unanimously rule against Sharif who has now stepped down. The court has disqualified him for ten years from holding public office. In a sense, unless something dramatic happens, the 10-year-long ban effectively ends Sharif’s political career. He is 67 and if the ban is carried out as imposed he would be 77 at its end. While there is nothing to say that a 77-year-old politician cannot return or, for that matter, Pakistan’s crazily unpredictable polity cannot create circumstances that may reinstate his career much earlier.
By some coincidence when Sharif faced his first political crisis and lost power in 1993 I was in Pakistan to play a friendly cricket match as a member of a foreign correspondents’ team from New Delhi that was invited by the then prime minister. Sharif was supposed to captain his team but had to opt out to put out the fires. There were also some murmurs that while his political fortunes were down in the dumps he could not possibly be playing cricket with a team from India, Pakistan’s enemy # 1. He did come to the cricket ground in Lahore at the end of our innings where we were introduced to him formally. He made a polite conversation about how our score was quite low. I don’t quite remember how many runs we scored although I do remember having taken three wickets. The match ended in a tie.
That was the last time I visited Pakistan. Sharif was 44 then and had a full career ahead of him despite his immediate crisis then. A great deal has happened since, including his ouster in a bloodless coup by his army chief Pervez Musharraf in October, 1999 and his subsequent exile to Saudi Arabia. He returned to Pakistan in 2007. He has a history having bounced back in a political system that takes no prisoners. So there is a theoretical possibility that he may yet beat this but the prospects look rather bleak at this point.
Sharif’s ruling party Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) will now have to find a replacement. Some political observers in Islamabad have said that Sharif may find a place-holder, a sort of a seat-warmer, as he goes about rehabilitating himself. However, I do not see how he manages to overcome 10-year-ban from public office other than managing to have a proxy prime minister whom he can control and trust. There are some expectations that his brother, Shehbaz Sharif, chief minister of Pakistan’s most politically influential Punjab state, could step in and keep it all in the family. I am not sure whether the Supreme Court ruling to disqualify him is a prelude to his prosecution that might lead to imprisonment. Again, Pakistan’s history has examples of leaders who also returned from prison to rise to rule.
The Supreme Court verdict is yet another instance of how volatile and fractious Pakistan’s polity remains after 70 years of its birth as an independent country. There will be a lot schadenfreude to go around over the verdict. However, for Pakistan as a country forever struggling to be stable it is not a good sign at all that its leaders are done in so frequently.
- That line is in Calibri to illustrate my point while the rest of the blog is in Trebuchet MS.
- The image compares Calibri (top) with Arial (bottom)