A few months back I got into an argument with a cousin over Panama Papers. Nothing new there, everyone’s had that argument at some point. What stuck with me wasn’t the argument itself but how it ended. I brought up the actual numbers, the 10 year sentence, the fine, the flats in London, and he just said “sab siyasi hai” and changed the subject. Not because he had a counter argument. Because there wasn’t one he wanted to make.
That’s the thing about blind loyalty in Pakistani politics. It’s not really about defending a leader anymore. It’s about refusing to look at what’s in front of you.
I’ll say this upfront because it matters for everything that follows: judgements in this country can be rigged. That’s not paranoia, it’s documented, and I’ll get to the documentation. But “the judiciary here has real problems” and “therefore every conviction against my guy specifically is fake” are two different claims, and this is a country where PML-N and PTI both have solid, on record proof of the first kind of problem, not just accusations shouted at a press conference.
Start with PML-N. In July 2018 an accountability court sentenced Nawaz Sharif to 10 years in prison and fined him $10.6 million over assets his family couldn’t explain, tied to four flats in London’s Avenfield House. His daughter Maryam got seven years. This followed the Panama Papers leak, verified by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, showing his children linked to offshore companies most Pakistanis had never heard of before 2016. In 2019 a video surfaced of the judge in a separate corruption reference against Sharif, Arshad Malik, sitting in his own living room telling a PML-N worker he’d been pressured into that ruling and coached on how Sharif could win the appeal on points he himself had gotten wrong. Malik denied it under oath afterward, and the Supreme Court eventually ruled the video inadmissible. But the scandal itself is on record. PML-N didn’t invent it.
Now PTI, and this is the part that usually gets left out when the Malik tape comes up as if PML-N is the only party with a real grievance. In March 2024, six sitting judges of the Islamabad High Court wrote a formal letter to Pakistan’s Supreme Judicial Council alleging sustained ISI interference in cases involving Imran Khan. This wasn’t a PTI press release. It was signed by six judges, addressed to the country’s judicial watchdog, and reported by Al Jazeera and documented in detail afterward. The letter described a judge’s brother-in-law being abducted and tortured into making false statements, hidden cameras found in another judge’s bedroom, and one judge hospitalised for high blood pressure from the stress of it. It specifically named a paternity case involving Khan as one where two of three judges had initially found the petition not maintainable and then came under pressure until it proceeded anyway. The ISI called the accusations frivolous. But six High Court judges putting their names to torture and hidden cameras is not a smaller claim than one judge caught on tape admitting he felt pressured. If the Malik tape is reason to distrust a Sharif verdict, the IHC letter is reason to distrust the process behind some of Khan’s cases too. You don’t get to accept one and wave off the other.
So on judiciary interference specifically, the criticism and the credit cut exactly the same way for both parties. Sharif’s family has one documented instance. Khan’s cases have a documented letter from six judges describing something considerably worse. Neither party invented these. Neither one erases the underlying facts either. Sharif’s unexplained London flats were never actually in dispute, only the judge’s conduct was. And Khan’s £190 million Al-Qadir Trust case still needs an explanation for where that money went. A compromised process around some of his other cases doesn’t answer that one.
On that case specifically, in January 2025 an accountability court convicted Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi, 14 years for him and seven for her, over roughly £190 million that Britain’s National Crime Agency returned to Pakistan in 2019, which prosecutors say was adjusted against a private land settlement instead of going to the treasury. PTI calls the whole prosecution fabricated. Given the IHC letter above, that suspicion isn’t paranoid on its face. But suspicion of the process and an explanation for the money are two separate things, and PTI supporters owe the second one just as much as PML-N supporters owe an explanation for the Avenfield flats.
Now PPP in Sindh, since that’s the one people from other provinces love bringing up and Sindhis get tired of hearing. PPP has run the province more or less continuously since 2008, going on close to two decades now. PTI’s Sindh president has put a number on the alleged damage: Rs1.65 trillion in corruption over 15 years by his count, including over Rs850 billion in the development budget alone. Take that figure with a grain of salt, it came from a rival party’s press conference and PTI has an obvious incentive to inflate it. But you don’t need PTI’s number to notice Sindh’s literacy rate sitting around 57 percent, or MQM asking for years why retired Karachi municipal workers haven’t received gratuity owed since 2017. On the other side, PPP does hold rural Sindh through actual delivery in a lot of villages, not just biraderi politics, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. Both things are true at once. PPP built real loyalty in the countryside, and Karachi has been falling apart on their watch for the same two decades.
Here’s a pattern that should bother everyone regardless of who they vote for, because it’s happened under both governments and neither side seems to notice when it’s their own turn. When PTI was in power, Nawaz Sharif’s family and party leaders were banned from meeting him in jail, and even his lawyers only got supervised visits. Now that PML-N is running things, Imran Khan’s sisters have spent months being turned away at Adiala jail despite court orders reinstating their visitation rights, with one of them filing a contempt of court petition over it. Different party in power, same jail, same denial, same excuses about security and political conversations. If it was wrong when PTI did it to Sharif’s family, it’s wrong now that PML-N is doing it to Khan’s. If you only get angry about the version that happened to your side, that’s exactly the blind spot this piece is about.
One more thing worth saying honestly. PTI’s supporters get singled out online more than anyone else’s for being emotional, and there’s truth in that. The movement runs on a level of personal devotion to Imran Khan that PPP and PML-N voters mostly don’t show toward their own leaders in quite the same way. But it’s worth pushing back a little on the idea that this is uniquely a PTI problem. PML-N workers spent months treating the Malik tape as proof their leader could do no wrong, rather than proof the judiciary has a pressure problem that applies to others too. PPP voters in the interior have stayed loyal through corruption allegations spanning multiple decades and multiple family members, without much public reckoning either. Emotional attachment to a party isn’t a PTI specific condition. PTI’s version is just louder online because that’s the terrain the party was built on from the start, and the other two have their own quieter version of the same thing.
None of this is whataboutism. The point isn’t that PPP’s Sindh record cancels out PML-N’s Panama case, or that the IHC letter cancels out Khan’s conviction, or that one judge’s tape cancels out six judges’ letter. The point is that all of it is true at the same time. Real corruption cases and real judicial interference scandals sitting right next to each other on both sides of the aisle, and most of us have trained ourselves to only see the half that hurts the other guy.
I’m not writing this because one of these parties is secretly the good one. A court convicted Nawaz Sharif over property nobody disputes existed, and a judge in one of his cases was caught on tape admitting pressure. A court convicted Imran Khan over money nobody disputes existed, and six judges put their names to a letter describing something far more serious than one tape. PPP delivers in rural Sindh and has let Karachi’s basic services rot for twenty years. All three of those things are true. You can support any of these three parties. What you can’t do is apply scrutiny in one direction only and call the rest propaganda.
What would actually help is simple to describe even if it’s hard to do. Praise your party when it earns it and say so out loud, not just in private. Criticise it when it deserves that too, in public, not just to your family over dinner. Hold PPP to the same standard on Sindh that you’d hold PTI to on federal governance, and hold PTI’s judiciary claims to the same standard you’d want applied to PML-N’s. None of the three parties are owed unconditional belief, and none of them are owed unconditional suspicion either. The test should be the same no matter whose name is on the ballot.
Loyalty to a party isn’t the same as loyalty to the country, and somewhere in the last few decades a lot of us stopped being able to tell the difference. Vote for whoever you want. Just stop flinching every time someone brings up something your side actually did, and start noticing when the same thing happens to the other side too. The country has to outlast all three of these parties. It only will if enough people start acting like it matters more than whichever one they’re backing this year.
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