NOT a few observers have remarked that the ongoing campaign to humiliate and ultimately destroy Senator Leila de Lima is simply a matter of karma.
The term, borrowed from Hinduism or Buddhism, suggests that a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence eventually decides his or her fate in future existences.
Applied to De Lima, this means her misdeeds as Justice secretary under the Aquino administration are now catching up to her in her new life as a senator—sans the protection of her former patron, who is facing some legal problems of his own.
We can perhaps forgive former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s husband, Mike Arroyo, for making the karma connection last month in a post on a social media page.
“Now that the shoe is on the other foot, how does karma feel?” Mr. Arroyo asked.
In his post, the former president’s husband said they were victims of political persecution by De Lima when she served as Justice secretary.
For example, in November 2011, De Lima barred the couple from leaving the country so that Mrs. Arroyo could seek medical treatment, defying a direct order from the Supreme Court prohibiting her from imposing a travel ban on them.
Later on, when Mr. Arroyo flew to Hong Kong on his own, De Lima said he had escaped, saying his flight was proof of guilt.
Mrs. Arroyo, of course, suffered even more—almost four years of detention for a case that the Supreme Court eventually threw out, under circumstances that the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights described as a violation of international law.
The Arroyos were not the only victims, however, when De Lima allowed herself to be used as a weapon for President Benigno Aquino III’s vindictiveness against his political rivals.
De Lima, for example, played a key role in demonizing Chief Justice Renato Corona, who was eventually removed from office by impeachment.
In these and many other cases, the Aquino administration and De Lima used the tried and tested formula of tarring and feathering their targets, trying them by publicity in an attempt to destroy their reputations. A favorite venue for this was the congressional hearing, where anything could be said and duly reported, regardless of the truth. These hearings, supposedly in aid of legislation, were really aimed at demolition, because the administration could not do the job in a court of law.
That De Lima never managed to convict Mrs. Arroyo after six years is proof enough of that.
It truly is a comeuppance that De Lima should suffer the same mistreatment—shamed pilloried in public with no equal opportunity to refute the allegations against her. That doesn’t make it right, however.
The underhanded tactics used by the previous administration were odious then; they are no less so today, even though the target seems to so richly deserve the same fate.
