Friday, August 28, 2009

POLITICAL ALGEBRA OF ‘MINUS ONE’

By

SUSHANT SAREEN

In Pakistan, people, power-brokers and political analysts normally start writing the political obituary of civilian governments within a few days of their assuming office. Often enough, the whispers in the corridors of power and drawing-rooms of power-brokers in Islamabad begin as nothing more than a conjecture, but soon they acquire a life of their own, and within a few months the conjecture tends to become a reality. The current dispensation has been somewhat fortunate in that whispers of moves being made to oust Asif Zardari from the Aiwan-e-Sadr (President House) are doing the rounds nearly 18 months after the PPP formed the government and around one year after Asif Zardari became President. While there is no imminent danger of the ‘minus-one’ formula being implemented any time soon – it usually takes many months before such formulas fructify – the insidious campaign that has been launched against Mr Zardari suggests that all is not well in Islamabad. To use the words of Pakistani journalist Mohammad Malick, “there are no rumours in Islamabad; there are only premature facts”.

There are probably three major reasons for the whispering campaign against Mr Zardari. The first is that the military establishment wants to keep the government under pressure and prevent it from taking any bold initiative in areas that the army considers to be its sole preserve – USA, India and Kashmir, Afghanistan, War of Terror, nuclear programme. The second is the growing disquiet in the military over the continuing sense of drift on issues of governance. Finally, the distrust and dislike that the Punjabi elite harbour for Mr Zardari is also fuelling the moves against the PPP-led government.

On the face of it, all talk of Mr Zardari’s premature removal from office appears to be quite bizarre. Short of another military coup, there is no easy way of getting rid of Mr Zardari before his Presidential term expires in 2013. But a military coup is not going to be possible, much less acceptable, under the current domestic and international political climate. The Pakistan army has barely started to recover its image that was badly sullied in the eyes of the people of the country during the Musharraf era. At a time when revulsion against the ancien regime of Musharraf remains very high, the army simply cannot afford to be seen to be short-circuiting the political process yet again.

What is more, the Pakistan army has its hands full in combating the Islamist insurgency. The last thing it would want is to take over the responsibility for running an increasingly dysfunctional country. Unlike the past when an army intervention was invariably welcomed by the main political opposition party, this time the army will face rejection from both the people as well as the principal opposition party, something that could easily shatter the fledgling national consensus in favour of the military operations against the ‘bad’ Taliban and have a devastating impact on these operations.

Of course, this does not preclude the possibility of the army and its dirty tricks department pulling the strings from behind the scenes to create a situation in which Mr Zardari’s continuation in office becomes untenable. The manner in which media personnel, many of them either firmly embedded with the intelligence agencies or else closet Taliban/al Qaeda sympathisers, are carrying out a sustained vilification campaign against Mr Zardari, is a clear sign that the powers-that-be are building pressure on the political set-up.

With direct military intervention ruled out for the moment, and Mr Zardari unlikely to use his presidential powers to dismiss his own government, there are two other ways in which Mr Zardari can be fixed – one, politically, and two, judicially. The problem is that political equation favours Mr Zardari. The PPP-led coalition, for the moment at least, has a comfortable majority in the National Assembly. Even if some of the coalition partners were made to withdraw support, and the government was to be reduced to a minority, it would not affect Mr Zardari who is the real target of the ‘minus-one’ formula; instead, it is Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani who will have to go home. Mr Zardari can of course be impeached. But that will require a two-thirds majority, which will be very difficult to attain given the current composition of the National Assembly where even the main opposition party would be chary of supporting any such political move.

This means that the only way Mr Zardari can be forced out is through the instrumentality of the judiciary, which in the flush of its new found empowerment is not only steadily encroaching into the domain of the executive branch of government, but is also imbued with a sense of manifest destiny of being the only institution that can clean the Augean stables of Pakistani national life. It is being widely speculated that the Supreme Court of Pakistan is likely to strike down the controversial National Reconciliation Ordinance that allowed Mr Zardari and many others to get all the cases registered against them scrapped. If this happens, all these cases will get reopened, something that will make Mr Zardari’s continuation in office extremely controversial and raise a clamour for his resignation on grounds of his being ineligible to hold the high office of President of Pakistan.

Although as President, Mr Zardari enjoys immunity from prosecution, such legal and constitutional technicalities have generally never prevented the courts in Pakistan from ruling against an inconvenient and unpopular incumbent. More than anything else, the halo that has been built around the judiciary has now given the judges the moral authority, legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of the Pakistani public to pass judgements that bring the high and mighty of the land crashing down. Anything less will probably taint the judiciary’s image in the public eye. It is of course entirely another matter that Pakistan's sanctimonious judiciary stops well short of “doing justice even if the heavens may fall” when it comes to taking action against the Pakistan army or upholding a ruling that affects a popular politician like Mr Nawaz Sharif.

Getting rid of Mr Zardari is perhaps not such an insurmountable problem for the Pakistani establishment. A more serious issue, however, is handling the post-Zardari phase. If Mr Zardari is replaced by another president and rest of the system continues as before then this will be an ideal situation. But the military establishment can bank upon the possibility of all other things remaining the same. There is in fact a very good chance that in the process of displacing Mr Zardari, Pakistan will face a much bigger political and constitutional mess than the one it faces currently. Fresh elections will almost certainly bring Mr Nawaz Sharif to power, a rather unappetising prospect for the army which is convinced that Nawaz Sharif will go all out to not only prosecute Musharraf on charges of treason, but also castrate the army’s ability to interfere in the politics of the country. On the other hand if elections are not held it could lead to widespread political unrest and pit the army against the people and perhaps also the judiciary. That will leave the army with no choice but to impose some sort of martial law, which in turn will have its own repercussions which the army would like to avoid.

In the final analysis, it is precisely these wider implications of the ‘minus-one’ formula, which if implemented will effectively translate into a ‘minus-all’ formula, that are likely to end up working in favour of Mr Zardari and leaving the army with no alternative but to continue doing business with him for the foreseeable future.

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<1267> 28th August, 2009

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Thursday, August 20, 2009

JINNAH REDUX

by

SUSHANT SAREEN

    The expulsion from BJP of Jaswant Singh for authoring the controversial book 'Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence' was unfortunate, and yet understandable, even inevitable. Mr Singh's continuation in the BJP had become untenable after the sales promotion campaign of the book in which he was seen to be extolling the 'virtues' – self-made man, secular etc – of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the creator of Pakistan and the man widely held responsible in India for the Partition and its horrendous fallout.

The BJP might even have been ignored someone praising Jinnah, but there was no way that the party could forgive Mr Singh for committing the cardinal sin of blaming titans like Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel for not accommodating Jinnah's political demands, thereby pushing India towards partition. This amounted to cutting at the ideological roots of the party, and no one was going to buy Mr Singh's claim that this was only his personal opinion and had nothing to do with the party. Already being disparaged as the 'Bharatiya Jinnah Party', the BJP was finding it impossible to distance itself from Mr Singh's 'personal opinion', much less live down the ridicule that was being heaped on it by its political opponents. Any other party in the same position would have reacted similarly – remember the treatment meted out to Mohit Sen by the CPM or the intolerance that the Congress has shown towards anyone in its ranks who questioned its icons.

In all fairness to him, Mr Singh's tragedy is that his detractors have pronounced their judgement without having taken the trouble of reading the book. Perhaps even if they had read the book, they would have failed to understand the fine nuances in the book that effectively rubbish Jinnah's achievement in creating Pakistan. In all likelihood, therefore, their reaction would have been no different had they read the book, but at least then the debate around Mr Singh's controversial assertions would have been more well-informed, maybe even enlightening. Although the book indulges in a sort of revisionism that many in India will find objectionable, Mr Singh to a large extent makes amends in the concluding chapter of his book, where he provides a lot of food for thought for anyone on both sides of the great India-Pakistan divide who cares to think about the events and attitudes that led to Partition.

The storm unleashed by the book, however, centres primarily around two major issues. The first is the person of Jinnah and Mr Singh's admiration of him. The second is Jinnah's politics and the justification, or should we say, alibi that Mr Singh tries to provide for it.

Jinnah was without doubt an exceptional man. His doggedness, his legal brilliance, his financial propriety, his sartorial elegance, his self-confidence (he once quipped "What is the Muslim league except me and my stenographer"), was all the stuff of legends. But Mr Singh's attraction to the personality of Jinnah merely on the grounds that he was a 'self-made man' is somewhat strange, if not specious. This is akin to someone admiring Dawood Ibrahim, who is not only a self-made man, but is (or was) quite secular both in his personal habits as well as in his profession.

That Jinnah was secular in his personal life is a well established fact. But drinking whisky, eating pork, or having friends belonging to another community is a rather spurious definition of secularism, particularly in the context of someone who in his public life espouses a cause which is totally sectarian and communal. Ultimately, secular is what secular does, and the political platform that Jinnah adopted raises the question of whether Jinnah was secularly communal or communally secular. It can be argued that despite running a virulently communal campaign for Pakistan, Jinnah did not want a theocratic state. But a denominational state, which is what Pakistan has become, was always going to be the logical culmination of forces that Jinnah had unleashed in his tussle with the Indian National Congress.

Perhaps there was a time – 1916 and the Lucknow pact – when Jinnah was an 'Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity'. But two decades later – 1937 onwards – it was a very different Jinnah. Either for reasons of personal ego and political self-aggrandisement, or as a spoiler working at the behest of the British Raj (see Wali Khan's Facts are Facts) or even as a born-again Muslim, Jinnah had become the standard-bearer of the pernicious 'Two-Nation theory' that sought to divide, rather than unite, the two communities. From this point on, instead of building bridges between the communities, he was only interested in advocating, articulating and securing the interests of a single community, if possible within a loosely structured Indian federation, otherwise as a separate state.

The imperial interests of the British, coupled with Jinnah's relentless advocacy of his case for Pakistan, had made partition inevitable. The communal genie that was let out of the bottle could never have been put back in and had partition been avoided in 1947, it would have taken place 10, 20 or maybe even 50 years later. In the circumstances that prevailed at that time, the decision taken by Nehru and Patel was unexceptionable. Short of giving in to Jinnah's blackmail, Nehru and Patel tried everything possible to prevent Partition, but failed.

To talk today of the Cabinet Mission plan as a possible way of avoiding Partition is to close one's eyes to the reality of those times. The Cabinet Mission plan was never going to work. By the time this plan was proposed, the poison of communalism and separatism had seeped far too deep in the psyche of the Muslims of India for them to be amenable to anything short of Pakistan. It was then not so much a question of addressing the self-created and self-serving insecurities of the Muslim community as it was about the future stability and functionality of the newly independent state. Had the Cabinet Mission plan been accepted, it would have created 50 Pakistan's. Nehru and Patel were absolutely correct in rooting for a strong centre over a loosely structured federation, even if this meant conceding Pakistan. That they were right and Jinnah was wrong is evident from the fact that Pakistan too has rejected the sort of federal structure that Jinnah had insisted upon as the price to be paid for keeping India united.

The tragedy is not so much that India was partitioned. After all, states have been formed, reformed, deformed, and unformed throughout the history of the subcontinent. In this sense the Partition is nothing out of the ordinary. But the religious cleansing and mass murder and migration that followed the Partition has probably no parallel in the history of the subcontinent. Nor for that matter is there any historical precedent in the subcontinent of borders being sealed for citizens of different states that have existed from time to time. But maybe the bitterness and hatred that Jinnah's politics had created, and which was nurtured by successive rulers of Pakistan, made hostility between India and Pakistan inevitable.

The question now is whether the peoples of the subcontinent can put behind them a very painful chapter of their history. Mistakes and miscalculations were made on all sides, sometimes out of pettiness, at other times because of hubris, and often in response to a situation over which they had little control. While we can endlessly quibble and quarrel over what happened, why it happened, who was responsible etc, there is a need to look towards the future. The choice before the three states that emerged out of the erstwhile British India is simple: they can either continue to stay in conflict; or else they can start to accept the reality of each other and try and forge areas of cooperation in order to improve the lives of their citizens. This, in the ultimate analysis, is the message of the book that Jaswant Singh has written, a message that has unfortunately got drowned in the din surrounding the book.

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    <1330 Words>                    20th August, 2009

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Monday, August 17, 2009

THE HUES AND LOWS OF PAKISTAN

By

SUSHANT SAREEN

    It is quite natural to be sceptical about yet another book on Pakistan based on the experiences of an American, or for that matter any Western journalist. Much of the writing by this tribe is second-hand and therefore second rate – they tend take a detached, almost supercilious, view of events, lack even a modicum of understanding of the people and the place, and generally have very limited exposure. Nicholas Schmidle however doesn't belong to this tribe. He has lived Pakistan in the true sense of the term and travelled to all the 'wrong' places (Swat, Balochistan, the districts bordering South Waziristan, being stranded on a bandit infested road in Sindh) and met all the 'wrong' people. Not surprisingly, his efforts made him a target of the infamous 'agencies' – he was first deported and on a subsequent visit barely escaped becoming another Daniel Pearl. In the process, he experienced first-hand the intimidation and fear that the 'state within a state' invokes in people.

    Schmidle reports what he sees and hears and avoids passing judgements or pontificating. For someone who knew next to nothing about Pakistan when he went to that country, he is incisive and insightful in his description of a deeply troubled country. The reason he has been able to do this is because unlike most foreign journalists who meet the usual suspects and spin doctors in Lahore and Islamabad and on this basis form their mostly ill-informed opinions about Pakistan, Schmidle uses his reporters instinct and his remarkable power of observation to make the effort to go to the heart of every major problem and issue afflicting Pakistan and tries to understand the undercurrents that are propelling Pakistan towards an unending chaos. As he quite correctly writes: "there were plenty of things that I would have never found in a book, and would have to learn on my own."

Reading Schmidle's account of Pakistan, it is difficult not to notice the huge disconnect in the attitude of the people who are friendly, welcoming and communicative and the 'establishment' which is hostile, haughty, repressive and paranoid. Nowhere does this insensitive and abrasive attitude of the predominantly Punjabi 'establishment' come out more blatantly than in the troubled province of Balochistan. The frustration, anger, alienation and bitterness in the Baloch is reflected in the indignation of a Baloch companion of Schmidle who after being repeatedly questioned by soldiers at a checkpoint in Gwadar snaps "F...g Punjabis! Who are they to ask me where I am going? I am Baloch. This is my city". In a single sentence Schmidle sums up the military operation in Balochistan and writes: "while the Pakistan army struggled and was ineffective in any fights against India, it has displayed a penchant for ruthlessly crushing domestic rivals."

The growing power of Taliban in Pakistan doesn't surprise Schmidle. He writes: "The more I looked around, the more I realized that everyone, everywhere in Pakistan, seemed to be offering some help. The military's intelligence agencies played a double game, taking money from the Americans and still aiding the Taliban. Pakistanis on the street praised the Taliban as humble, pious servants of Allah." The ambivalence towards the Taliban among ordinary Pakistanis is illustrated by two quotes. A young man from South Waziristan tells Schmidle: "The Taliban's only problem is coercion. Otherwise they are doing a good job." And then there is the journalist from Bannu who says that the Taliban are projected wrongly and that "if they come to Bannu and don't hurt anyone, then there won't be any objections".

Talking of Bannu, Schmidle describes a 'famed tradition' of that city, one that would warm the hearts of those who support the scrapping of Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Apparently, every evening the males leave their wives at home and congregate in the Bannu bazaar, draped in jasmine necklaces, which they would loop around the neck of any attractive boy to signal that he was 'taken'!

Schmidle's book makes for very compelling reading and is a must read for anyone who doesn't know anything about Pakistan but also for those who think they know everything about the place. But perhaps it is his prognosis of Pakistan's future that is most interesting. According to Schmidle "the political, social, economic and religious dynamics embedded in Pakistan seemed to become more and more complicated – and volatile – with time, and less and less solvable". But he doesn't subscribe to the view that Pakistan will breakup. Instead, he writes, it is "more likely that Pakistan will continue to exist in a perpetual state of frenzied dysfunction; alive, but always appearing to be on the verge of perishing".

TO LIVE OR PERISH FOREVER by Nicholas Schmidle

Pages: 271; Price: Rs. 299; Publisher: Random House India

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    <775 Words>                        8th August, 2009

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Friday, August 14, 2009

THE BATTLE IS BIGGER THAN BAITULLAH

By

SUSHANT SAREEN

    The elimination of the head of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Baitullah Mehsud in a drone strike is without doubt a significant gain for both the US and the Pakistani security forces. But while no tears need be shed over the death of a monster like Baitullah, celebrating his end as though it is the end of the Islamist insurgency in Pakistan is trifle unnecessary. The fact of the matter is that the battle that Pakistan is fighting against the Islamists is much bigger than Baitullah and is not likely to fizzle out merely because one of the biggest icons of the insurgents has been removed from the scene.

This is not to say that Baitullah's death will not have an impact on the future course of the insurgency. If the reports of internecine warfare among the insurgents are true, then in the short run the military operations and terror campaign of the insurgents could be badly disrupted. A lot, including the choice of his successor and the trajectory of the insurgency as well as the impending Pakistan army operations in South and North Waziristan, will however depend on the circumstances surrounding the successful targeting of Pakistan's most wanted man.

    It was no secret that after Baitullah was declared public enemy No.1 by Pakistan, no effort would have been spared to take him out. Baitullah was well aware of how desperately he was being sought by the Pakistanis. After the Americans put a bounty on Baitullah's head, and started actively hunting for him using the drones, the TTP chief would have become even more secretive about his movements and whereabouts. For over a month before the drones finally found Baitullah, there were a number of attacks on targets where he was supposed to be present.

But all these drone strikes failed because Baitullah was not present when the drones struck. After so many attempts, even a novice would have known that the last place that someone like Baitullah should have gone to was the house of a close relative. And yet, he was caught literally with his pants down in the house of his second wife! Perhaps, Baitullah went to the house of his wife because he had received certain guarantees that he would not be targeted.

    Quite aside the fact that Pakistan army has often used the ploy of guaranteeing safe passage only in order to get their hands on an elusive adversary –for instance, Nawab Nauroz Khan in Balochistan and Nek Mohammad in South Waziristan – the real success of the Pakistanis and Americans is that they managed to gain real-time intelligence about Baitullah's movements. According to some reports, the drones struck within an hour of Baitullah reaching the house of his father-in-law. What is more, the precision with which the drones struck clearly indicates that someone sold Baitullah out. The big question is why was he sold out – was it done for the money, was it done for revenge or was it done as part of a larger strategic deal involving the Pakistan army, the Americans and the Taliban led by Mullah Omar and other commanders like Sirajuddin Haqqani, a deal for which Baitullah had to be sacrificed either because he was as an obstacle or because his head was the price that was demanded.

The answer to this question could become clear in the next few days and weeks. If the Pakistan army refrains from launching an offensive in South Waziristan and if Baitullah's successor is someone who is not averse to going along with a tactical deal aimed at easing the mounting military pressure, then it would suggest that Baitullah was sold out as part of a deal in which the Taliban will cease attacks on Pakistani troops, the Afghan elections will go through without too much disruption, and some sort of political negotiations will commence to provide an exit to the Americans and give the Taliban a stake in the power structure in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, if there is a spurt in attacks on the Pakistan army and suicide bombings in urban centres inside Pakistan, then it will indicate that the missile that hit Baitullah has blown apart the tenuous agreement that was being brokered between the TTP and Pakistan army and which led to a temporary halt in the suicide bombings in Pakistan over the past few months. In either event, the relief for Pakistan and the US will be temporary. The al Qaeda inspired ideological force propelling the Islamist insurgency, coupled with the involvement thousands of highly committed jihadists in this insurgency, are not going to disappear with the death of one man.

Of course, to the extent that all the groups and commanders in the TTP accepted Baitullah as the Emir, his death is a setback that could lead to a leadership struggle between the various claimants to Baitullah's mantle, which in turn could lead to the dismantling of the complex network of terror that Baitullah presided and which made him so powerful. This, at least, is what the Pakistani authorities would fervently be hoping will happen because then they will be able to exploit the differences between various commanders and make them fight against each other. A succession war in the TTP will weaken the commanders and make it so much easier for the Pakistani authorities to play them off against each other and then pick them off one by one and do all this without having to mount any major military operation in the tribal areas.

For the moment, however, reports of warring commanders appear to be more of psy-war than reality. On their part, Baitullah's commanders too have succeeded in sowing confusion over Baitullah's death by not announcing the name of his successor. But even if things were to come reach a point where Taliban warlords fight each other to gain supremacy over the movement, the dynamics of the severely disturbed conditions in Pashtun areas of Pakistan are not going to alter materially.

One big reason for this is that TTP is not a monolith which will crack because of infighting. The TTP is really a loose confederation of disparate groups bound together by a common ideology, purpose, and enemy. Each group is quite autonomous operationally in the area under its control. According to sources in Pakistan, even while Baitullah was alive, he would give a broad policy direction and leave the operational details to the local commanders. In fact, for quite some time now, because of bad health, Baitullah was not very active operationally and was more of a figurehead. The real strategising and execution of attacks was done by commanders like Hakimullah Mehsud, Qari Hussein and Waliur Rehman.

This organisational structure of the TTP is not going to change after Baitullah. In fact there is a very good chance that if the pressure mounts on the groups affiliated to the TTP, the commanders might close ranks and in the interest of self-preservation continue to cooperate and coordinate with each other, more so since most of Baitullah's commanders have no love lost for the Pakistan army and intelligence agencies and revel in targeting them. Aiding and assisting the TTP materially and militarily in this task will be the vast al Qaeda network, which will use its influence to paper over any differences between the commanders.

But more than the opposition, the big worry for Pakistan is the hubris of the Pakistan army, especially after the operations in Swat where the army has managed to re-establish state control with relative ease. This could easily lead the military brass to conclude that the Taliban are not the existential threat that they were being made out to be and therefore there is no need to review, much less change, the policy of using the 'reconcilable' Taliban for strategic purposes. This would be a terrible mistake. For one, Swat is not Waziristan. For another, the Pakistan army has so far fought and won only the conventional conflict in Swat; the dirty war remains to be fought because most of the Taliban fighters have escaped and are now engaged in guerrilla warfare. For a third, internecine warfare in FATA will not solve the problem of Islamist militancy; rather it will lead to total chaos and anarchy in that area, which will then spread into the settled districts. Finally, any negotiated settlement that brings the Taliban back in Afghanistan will in one way or another provide a fillip to Islamist movements inside Pakistan, just as they did when the Taliban first occupied Kabul in 1996.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

TWO TRUCKS AND ONE JEEP

By

SUSHANT SAREEN

    In a reality check to the wild celebrations that broke out in Pakistan after the Supreme Court declared 'illegal and unconstitutional' the emergency that was imposed by Gen. Pervez Musharraf on 3rd November 2007, former Prime Minister Shujaat Hussain reminded his compatriots that "two trucks and a jeep" is all it takes to disrupt democratic rule in the country. While everyone from the president down have welcomed the Supreme Court ruling, and said that it will strengthen democratic institutions and "block the way of any unconstitutional usurpation of the people's rights of governance", they are probably singing the hosannas a little too early in the day. No doubt, in its own way, the Supreme Court under chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry has passed a 'historic' judgement, but whether this will be able to stop the 'two trucks and a jeep' will not be known until after the next military coup in Pakistan.

    Thrice in the past, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has gone against the establishment and ruled in favour of the democracy and politicians. The first time was in 1972 when the bench headed by the then chief justice Yakoob Ali Khan ruled that Gen. Yahya Khan's martial law regime was illegal. Of course, Yahya was no longer in power by the time this ruling was made. Then in 1993, the then Supreme Court headed by Nasim Hasan Shah (one of the judges who acted as the executioner of Zulifkar Ali Bhutto) ruled that the dismissal of Nawaz Sharif's first government by president Ghulam Ishaq Khan was not wrong and ordered the government to be restored. At that time, the then army chief Gen. Abdul Waheed Kakar intervened and forced both president Ghulam Ishaq Khan and the restored Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, to resign.

The third time was in 2007 when Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry was restored to his office by the Supreme Court. In this case, the pressure of the public, the lawyers' movement (the threats and defiance that the judges faced from the lawyers) and the general turn of political climate against Musharraf (he appeared totally baffled by the sudden turn of events against him), and most of all, the confidence and sense of empowerment that Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry's 'No' to a military dictator gave to rest of the judiciary, ensured the chief justice's restoration. Other than these three past precedents, there is not a single instance until the current ruling where the judiciary has challenged the military establishment's political shenanigans.

    The reason for scepticism over the efficacy of this latest ruling of the Supreme Court in preventing another military intervention is based on Pakistan's sordid past. The 1972 ruling was followed by the inclusion of Article 6 in the constitution of 1973 that made any abrogation or subversion of the constitution or any aiding or abetting of such subversion (read military coup) an act of high treason which would be punishable by death. Together, it was believed, these two measures would close the doors to any military takeover. And yet, within a couple of years (1977), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was overthrown in a military coup by Gen. Ziaul Haq. Some two decades later, Gen. Pervez Musharraf usurped power from a prime minister who enjoyed a two-thirds majority in Pakistan's National Assembly. Therefore anyone who imagines that the door has been shut on military coups forever is only fooling himself.

    The act of deposing a lawfully constituted civilian government in Pakistan has been perfected into a fine art by the Pakistan army, only the timing has to be right. After the 'two trucks and a jeep' have done their job, the first thing that a military ruler does after taking over is that he sends the politicians either home or to prison. The next target is the judiciary. The inconvenient judges are identified and then eased out by not being invited to take the oath on the Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO) that is issued by the military dictator. Once the judiciary is packed with 'loyal' judges who in their new oath of office have sworn to not question the validity of the coup, any legal challenge to the martial law regime become a mere formality. Often the legal challenge is mounted by a lackey of the new regime just in order to allow the courts to validate the takeover. Once this is done, then depending upon the political situation, elections are held in which the winners are invariably the King's party who then manoeuvre to indemnify the actions of the coup-makers.

    The critical aspect in this entire game is timing. Military coups generally take place after the civilians have fouled things up so badly or things have deteriorated to a point that the government of the day has reached the summit of unpopularity. The Generals march in at that stage and are welcomed as 'saviours' by the people as well as opposition politicians. In these circumstances, if judges are sacked, the bureaucracy is purged and the Augean stables of politics cleansed, there is not a murmur of protest from anywhere or anyone. Chances are that something similar will happen when the next military coup takes place. If at that stage, a few judges try to defy the army, they will simply be locked away and that will be the end of the matter.

With time, however, a military regime too starts becoming unpopular and there comes a stage when either on account of political mistakes (as in the case of Musharraf and to an extent, Ayub Khan) or because of cataclysmic events like 1971 debacle (as in the case of Yahya) or on account of 'divine intervention' (in the case of Zia), the continuation of a dictator in power becomes impossible. This is when there is a transition to civilian rule (Pakistanis like to call it democracy!). It is during this transition that rulings like the one given on 31st July, 2009, or the ones passed earlier in 1972, 1993 and 2007 become possible. And this is also the reason why this judgement will mean absolutely nothing until and unless the judiciary finds the courage to stand up against the next military regime, as and when it comes into power. After all, it is one thing to pass such a judgement at a time when the situation is not conducive for the army to intervene directly and quite another to rule against the army when it has just taken over.

To put it simply, Gen. Musharraf is down and out today and what better time to kick him in the face? The fact that he is still widely reviled inside Pakistan makes the task of making him a scapegoat, and a fall guy for all that has gone wrong in recent years so much easier for everyone – for the army which in an effort to restore its tarnished image can now wash its hands off the 'wrong' and unpopular decisions made by Musharraf, for the judiciary which is giving Musharraf as good as it got from him, and for the government which having failed miserably in giving even a modicum of good governance finds it convenient to satisfy the blood-lust of the people by making a spectacle of a former dictator.

All this is not to argue against the merits of the judgement. There can be no two opinions that the emergency imposed on 3rd November 2007 by Musharraf (not as president but as army chief) was a euphemism for a military coup and as such was totally illegal and unconstitutional, something that Musharraf himself had admitted. But then why hold him alone responsible. What happens to all those people who 'aided and abetted' this act, which should include the current army chief and most of the top brass of the army as also the entire ruling party of that time?

Perhaps the judges already realise the limits of their power and that is why they have quite conveniently left to the government the decision on prosecuting Musharraf on charges of high treason. The government faces a Hobson's choice on this issue: If it proceeds against Musharraf, it might invite a backlash from the army (especially since Musharraf could point fingers at all those people who aided and abetted his actions on 3rd November, 2007, many of who are today holding pivotal positions in the army and bureaucracy. What is more, such a move against Musharraf could also violate pledges and understandings reached with foreign powers that played the role of guarantors in the past; On the other hand, if the government doesn't move against Musharraf, it will face public opprobrium and open itself to charges of supporting a hated dictator.

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    <1450 Words>                        5th August, 2009

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