Adnan Rehmat
Capital crown by Adnan Rehmat
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January 10th by Adnan Rehmat.
Taking a close look at a city is like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it. Take a close look at Islamabad in all its pompous perplexity and clinical contradictions and not much popular ownership is apparent. Not that it prevents it from boasting a large number of peculiar characteristics even though these never show up in tourist brochures. It is, for instance, the ‘newest’ proper city in the country, the ‘newest’ city of Pakistan with a population of a million or more (the eighth in the country now) and even the ‘newest’ city in Asia that is also the capital of a country.
Cynics could also emphasise Islamabad is the newest capital of Pakistan! (Karachi was the last, remember, anyone?) And, in this fact, emerges a side to the city that is debated little. A golden jubilee is a good time for us to revisit the historic compulsions that made Islamabad not just the federal capital of Pakistan but a city that was built from scratch not too long ago. When Pakistan was created in 1947, its biggest city then, as now, was Karachi and was, after not a too-lengthy discussion, nominated and designated as the capital of the country. That’s where the founder and first leader of the country, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, set about his government.
Capital investment
In less than 15 years the founder was dead, the first prime minister assassinated, the country had its first experience of Martial Law and a military ruler and a second capital — Islamabad. Some years after the coup, the military led by General Ayub Khan (who went on to declare himself field marshal) faced stiff political resistance from the streets of Karachi, particularly language and religion riots, forcing the unelected regime to confront the protesters with force. The protracted political turmoil forced the military ruler to make a decision that would seal the fate of Pakistan: shift the capital away from the teeming noisy and nosy civilians who could be kept at bay far away.
Ayub first decided Abbottabad, his hometown, as the new capital but was persuaded it lay on an active seismic faultline and opted instead for the plains of Potohar ringed by the scenic Margalla Hills and close to the Raj-era garrison town of Rawalpindi that would provide available basic infrastructure to base the military. Starting in 1960, Ayub oversaw the rise of a brand new city at a relatively blistering pace. He had Greeks design it and Turks build it and announced a public award to nominate a name for the new capital.
Capital punishment
Islamabad it was named and it came to be the second capital of Pakistan. Ironically, it also became, in barely a decade, the former capital of a future (while the civil war lasted) country — Bangladesh — and so serves as the vanguard of the relatively new as also the relatively old. Within a decade of being the new seat of government, it failed to serve its declared principal purpose of a symbol of the glorified federation by losing two-fifths of the territory and just over half the population it governed.
The city may have been new but it was built in the fashion of ancient times when cities grew out of military posts established. It says something about the mala fide raison d’être of Islamabad’s genesis that for roughly the first half of its existence, the population of the federal capital was less than the size of the military! That the nascent federal capital and the military headquarters existed side by side was, therefore, by design. The military had clearly decided that they were better off ruling the country from a base that had no political ownership and was not rooted in a sub-nationalism that could trouble the generals. The next 40 years proved it: the coups of General Ziaul Haq and General Pervez Musharraf were so easy to conduct, it took barely two hours of work each time.
Capital intensive
The formula was easy — seize the Prime Minister House, Pakistan Television and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation in the smallish (and almost provincial) Islamabad and you had the country. Since the federal capital itself had local residents in a small minority — the bulk of the population, government servants, drawn from the far off federating units with no local ties and stakes — there would be no resistance. And there never has been. The adjacent city of Rawalpindi was a garrison city and could never create trouble — and never did.
In this way, this city, tailor-made for friendly military takeovers and khaki rule, has served its intended purpose well. It is difficult to imagine a military power based in the densely populated and short-tempered Karachi or Lahore or Peshawar to both seize the city and hold it virtually indefinitely as Islamabad has proved. Indeed, Karachi, which forced the military out and Dhaka, which the military couldn’t hold once the residents turned against it, prove Islamabad’s purposeful exception.
Capital capers
Similarly despotic dispensations and regimes have done an Islamabad elsewhere in the world. Finding holding angrily confident Karachi-like cities Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Almaty in Kazakhstan and Lagos in Nigeria difficult, tinpot dictators or military-backed elites in these countries have created new administrative capitals to both entrench themselves and keep their citizens at bay. Brazil has Brasilia, Kazakhstan has Astana and Nigeria has Abuja as their versions of Islamabad — devoid of locally-rooted residents, orderly, glittering, resource-stacked cities that serve as functional utopias and safely entrenched power centres.
Little wonder then that Islamabad offers all the telltale signs of a city designed for an ulterior purpose that seems like a support resource for the elites. Islamabad is the only ‘civilian’ territory in Pakistan without self-rule (the only other regions in the country without elected representation are the cantonments). There is no local government in Islamabad. No democracy by law or practice in the capital of a democratic country! No elected local assembly or council in a city that houses the elected bicameral parliament in the country. The parliament may rule the country but the city is ruled by unelected municipal bureaucrats!
Capital crimes
This is a city where your life is lived out along residential grids that reveal your financial status. Even in death, your place of burial in graveyards determines your social status. Hospitals, eateries, parks, schools and offices all are straight giveaways to the ranks and grades that this city brands its citizens by and makes them wear it on their sleeves. Sure, there are exceptions but all end up only proving the rule. This is a city where there are more wheels than there are legs — over half a million cars in a city of 1.2 million people. The high literacy rate of the city fails to match the low ratio of the regions of the country it rules.
Few in Karachi build a second house in Peshawar and fewer still in Lahore do so in Quetta but nearly everyone who is anyone in the country builds one house in Islamabad. And yet the housing shortage in the city is over 350,000 and no new residential sector has been opened, allotted and built in 15 years. All of this is by design. A city where the cheapest 125 square yards (5 marla) plot of land in open sectors is for Rs 4 million is a city of the bourgeois. This city is designed to be straight and ordered, neat and clipped. But ironically, the city has come to represent an ideal that espoused endless opportunities for a country created not too long before it but has only managed to accumulate the best of the worst bits while the country it governs has the worst of the best. There’s something missing in this city that everyone in the country is looking for but few know what.
The best policy by Adnan Rehmat
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George W Bush has led America’s ‘war against terrorism’ since that fateful deceptive morning on Sep 11, 2001. His administration named Osama Bin Laden as responsible for the biggest act of terrorism against the United States, and probably against the Western world, in recent decades. Bin Laden happened to be based, along with his organisation Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, next door to Pakistan. In the ensuing years, the American-led war against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and their myriadsupporters, has been waged in both the conventional form — wars and regime change against countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) that were supposedly hosting and aiding the accused — and in other ways (intelligence and/or covert operations) with or without the permission of dozens of countries. Pakistan falls in the latter bracket, for now. Many are starting to become convinced that new developments may change all that and elevate Pakistan into the former group.
The result of the war against terror has been, at a minimum, tens of thousands dead, injured or arrested/tortured and millions displaced. Collateral damage is probably difficult to quantify with accuracy. The outcome is a world that is more paranoid, more unsettling and more uncertain than before the terrible events of 9/11. After Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan is probably the state most adversely affected and mortally wounded by the aftermath of 9/11. Political and socio-economic stability has wreaked havoc with both non-state and state terrorism against large parts of the country leaving many reeling with talk growing of the state coming unraveled and a change in political boundaries.
Heads You Win, Tails I Lose
The foreign policy of Pakistan has always had relations with the US at its centre. And it’s been a bittersweet relationship. The lack of a sustainably strategic and consensual framework of bilateral relations has both benefitted and blighted Pakistan. Benefitted by way of supporting Pakistan economically and militarily at key moments of its history when usually India has threatened (and, in 1971, actually achieved the goal) to unravel the country. And blighted by way of supporting the varieties of either shameless or clever military dictatorships, which have ensured that the country has never been clear about its national ambition — there is no national consensus of what kind of Pakistan its constituents want in, say, 2050. If the consensus was a ‘prosperous Pakistan’ the rampant poverty, illiteracy and over-population and institutional discrimination on religious, gender and national grounds, as enshrined in the constitution, and the inter-provincial, sectarian and socio-economic tensions is certainly no way to go about it.
The post-9/11 Pak-US relations have been a pretty much predictable affair with leaves heavily borrowed from the past for solutions but interesting in its contradictions nonetheless. For Pakistan, relationship with the US has always been a case of ‘heads you win, tails I lose’. In the late 1970s, when the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan afforded a chance to the US to deal a mortal blow to the Kremlin via a proxy war, the Pakistani military dictatorship stepped up as a solution in a Faustian bargain. Tens of billions of dollars flowed in and the military was supported in its control of the country for a decade. Democracy suffered and a largely secular population was radicalised to generate support (and provide fodder — ‘mujahideen’) for the jihad, which wasn’t such a dirty word in the 1980s. Fast forward to the first decade of the new millennium and voila! The military comes in handy again, so democracy suffers again. Musharraf and his men in uniform remain entrenched for most part of this decade and the big bucks keep rolling in. But there’s a reverse ’social engineering’ to do this time: attempts to force — secularise a by-now radicalised nation.
Heroes and Villains
However, this is not the 1980s. The heroes of then (mujahideen/Taliban including Bin Laden) are the villains of today and vice versa (US is now the ‘occupier’, not ‘liberator’), as the local perceptions go. And both Washington and Islamabad know it. However, the options of fashioning a ‘better’ public profile for both Islamabad and Washington in the country here is limited by not what Pakistan wants but the US. And that means really hard times ahead for Pakistan, for the US is gearing up for no less than war in Pakistan’s tribal areas since it seems to have run out of patience with both Pakistan’s willingness and capacity to do Washington’s bidding in the Pak-Afghan border regions. The problem with this solution is that it translates into political suicide for Islamabad. The military establishment’s reluctance to give up its ‘back-up plan’ of keeping the Taliban card intact in case of the collapse of the Indian-supported Karzai government and installing its own proxies in Kabul at some future date runs afoul of US interest in containing and destroying the Al Qaeda-Taliban combine, which it has determined has recouped from the international attack on it and claims is getting ready to mount another 9/11-scale event.
This is bad news for Pakistan. If the post- and pre-9/11 history of PaK-US bilateral relations is any guide, Islamabad will have little to do but adjust its foreign policy to align with Washington’s plans for Pakistan’s western borders in general and the tribal areas in particular, which it sees now as fast turning into a virtual non-country that houses its biggest enemies. And this means, to get ready to redeploy the Pakistan Army in the tribal areas — this time ultra-aggressively — face heavy loss of men and material, trigger heavy collateral damage and risk a full-scale insurgency. Because such an eventuality is, many believe, set up for failure (the last three years have seen major military failures and net secession of territory to non-state actors) in the short-term, the conditions will be ripe for the US to technically dispense with its respect for Pakistan’s sovereignty and invade the tribal areas, in the medium-term. Such a course will, if it comes to that, it can be assumed, be ordered by the next US president rather than the incumbent (unless a certain tall, gaunt and bearded Arab is spotted in the tribal areas earlier).
What’s Coming?
And that means either Barrack Obama or John McCain (depending on who makes it to the White House this fall) will put their signatures on the invasion order (their job has been made clearer by the CIA declaring this summer that the tribal areas have all but emerged as the place where the next 9/11 is being given final shape). If its helps to understand better, here’s what both these leaders say, in their own words, in their respective future official strategies on the war against terror in short essays in the latest Time magazine edition on how to defeat Al Qaeda and Taliban:
Obama: “We must recognise that the central front in the war on terror is not in Iraq, and it never was. The central front is Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is unacceptable that almost seven years after 9/11, those responsible for the attacks remain at large. If another attack on our homeland occurs, it will likely come from the same region where 9/11 was planned… We should condition some assistance to Pakistan on their action to take the fight to the terrorists in their borders. And if we have actionable intelligence about high-level Al-Qaeda targets, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot.”
McCain: “A special focus of our regional strategy must be Pakistan where terrorists today enjoy sanctuary… We need to convince Pakistanis that this is their war as much as it is ours… When I’m Commander-in-Chief, there will be nowhere the terrorists can run and nowhere they can hide.”
Since there is likely to be virtually no honeymoon period between a new White House occupant in Washington and the President/Prime Minister House(s) in Islamabad, the pressure will be on Pakistan to deliver immediately or let the Americans ‘finish a job you can’t’. And the American establishment has until the New Year to allow Islamabad to wipe out the biggest threat to the planetís most powerful country. How many in Pakistan, let alone an impatient world, believe this is possible? Go figure. What goes for Pak-US bilateral relations post-9/11 is nothing more than a diplomatic order for Pakistan to make up for America’s war against terror failures. While for the US the brief is to succeed come hell or high water, Pakistan’s problem is that it can’t even fail properly, leave alone succeeding.
Is the Party Over? by Adnan Rehmat
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The Pakistan People’s Party has many strengths: it is a survivor having surmounted some vicious witch-hunts by brutish dictators as well as machinations of more publicly acceptable meanies; it has been owned by the country’s armies of the poor; it bravely professes liberal and secular ideals in a conservative milieu; in a man’s world it has given the country the leadership of women that even its opponents respect; it proffers ideals and promises that have universal appeal in a multi-national, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual country. And, perhaps, most importantly, in a land where people forget quickly and are even quicker to withdraw support, it has been entrusted by a majority of voting voters no less than five times in the last 35 years to make life better for them even though it has failed them each time.Understood that more than ideals it is interests that make the world go round but the PPP that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto built seems so far removed from reality today and its image of the defender of the underdog and the fighter of losing causes, and is doing things that are even stretching incredulity. For a party that needs to convince no one of its shining, unmatched history of resisting the Establishment, it is making an art out of maintaining the status quo even as its main (albeit reluctant) political foe steals the thunder from it in articulating the popular sentiment and spearheading causes espousing timeless appeal.
In a democracy the majority party in parliament, or a coalition of a simple majority, gets the right to impose its vision and values even if they run contrary to the views or beliefs of other parties that fail to win the right to access to state resources needed to put them into practice. However, in a democracy, the chief winner comes to power only after being given a mandate. The PPP would have us believe it’s the other way round.
The way that the PPP of today has dealt with key issues in its first year in office has ended up converting it into a party that uses state resources in the interests of the establishment — and worse, personal — over what is in the interests of the voters it represents. From firming up the independence of judiciary to constitutional reforms and from strengthening the parliament to strengthening the federation, it has spectacularly failed on all these key counts despite having the needed numbers to keep these promises. And, in the process, it has managed to do to itself what Messrs Zia and Musharraf couldn’t — become a vanguard for status quo rather than for change that is sweeping Pakistan.
Granted the PPP went into a tailspin with Benazir’s outrageous political elimination but the mandate did not change with her death and the country’s most influential political party came out of the larger than life shadow of the charismatic Bhuttos without whom the idea of Pakistan seems so different. And yet a party that has made an art of survival and adapting itself out of setbacks and championing renewal started withering away at the moment that was supposed to be the beginning of a glorious era of change.
Despite generous support from its formidable political rival (let’s not forget the rise of the PML-N lies in the failure of the PPP organisation in Punjab), the PPP slipped at what was supposed to be the most golden moment in its history since Bhutto senior’s judicial murder: in power after 13 years with a mandate and necessary numbers and support in parliament to restore the original 1973 constitution.
Something must be wrong with a party that does not elect its most respectable and popular leader. While Benazir had few parallels in the whole of the country, leave alone her own party, after her death if it cannot offer up the likes of Raza Rabbani and Aitzaz Ahsan for leadership, especially when they are respected by even their political foes, then why does it surprise us that the party failed its fundamental test of putting itself in the right hands. If spending the numbers of years in jail (whether rightly or wrongly is not even under debate here) is the yardstick by which a politician’s leadership qualities and eligibility to lead political parties and countries are measured, then Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a spectacular failure.
For once there wasn’t even the lineage issue at hand — the final legally eligible Bhutto (bar Sanam who is fiercely apolitical) was dead and a non-Bhutto had to be chosen for the first time in the party’s life as its leader come what may. Even if Benazir had said Zardari was dependable, it didn’t have to be him (after all she was snubbed at her desire of keeping her son out of politics) — that he has singularly managed to make PPP the most unpopular mainstream party (the recent polls confirm this) within one year goes only to prove this. An under-age Bhutto (Bilawal) was enough at the symbolic helm but why need a proxy-Bhutto in the driver’s seat if the party was really as strong and resilient as it was supposed to be?
People vote for political parties that have leaders they believe can deliver for them and kdep their word. Voters trust their leaders as they trust their own family members. If they fail, they lose their right to lead. The political parties are fuelled by voters’ trust and must be accountable for keeping their promises and delivering on the mandate given them.
By that yardstick, how many of PPP voters will vote back for the party if elections are held any time soon? It’s amazing to see that whenever people have broken away from the PPP, they have largely done so due to in-house differences and for lack of pluralism and dissent within the party. It’s even more amazing this time round because ministers and senior office bearers are resigning while in power!
There must be something wrong with a party that keeps its best, brightest and most respected away from the party centre and forces them into the margins. The likes of Aitzaz Ahsan, Raza Rabbani, Safdar Abbasi, Enver Baig, Naheed Khan — all known for their unflinching loyalty and integrity (they don’t even have token corruption cases against them!) even in the times of duress — have become pariahs and are badmouthed by lesser party mortals. How can a party shun these stalwarts who don’t even abandon the party in a huff even when they are decried unlike the lesser likes of Farooq Leghari, Aftab Sherpao and Salman Taseer who went for greener pastures?
A party is as good as the promises it keeps and helps create and facilitate conditions in which the people can tap opportunities to keep pace with change and retain the edge they need to get ahead in life. A party that stands for (intentionally, inadvertently or out of carelessness) the status quo cannot last long.
The last time the PPP was in power there were 15 million fewer Pakistanis and now 65 per cent of Pakistanis are under 18 (the voting age) who do not have any recollection of Benazir in action (they only saw her for a few weeks in late 2007 before she was killed) or of Nawaz Sharif in power. Can’t the PPP understand that the demographics, communications, thinking, priorities and life have changed so much in Pakistan these past 13 years and it cannot preside over a new Pakistan with old world approaches, priorities and leadership styles?
In today’s Pakistan you can’t make promises of cleaning up the distortions in constitution, facilitate a new social contract, guarantee equal rights, opportunities and justice for all, a more representative and accountable government that puts people at the centre of all national enterprise and not keep these promises and get away with it. The new Pakistan is not about whether the murders of Bhutto and Benazir can be avenged or not or whether Nawaz or Taseer or Altaf or Asfandyar are right or wrong; it’s about what is right or wrong for the people who are sending parties to power to exercise it on their behalf, not use it for their personal privilege.
Iftikhar Chaudhry and Nawaz Sharif and Aitzaz Ahsan are not popular as alternatives to Zardari but as potential representatives who can put themselves in danger and personal deprivation for others. These are people who have led by example. If the PPP does not understand this and focuses on the raison d’etre of being in office, the party is over.
Noble Salam by Adnan Rehmat
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Dr Abdus Salam is mainly known for three things – his nationality, his religion and that he won the prestigious Nobel Prize, albeit in the reverse order. What is generally not known about him is that he refused to surrender the nationality of a country that disowned him (Pakistan) and become an Italian citizen even after being requested by Rome (or refused to be buried outside the country that gave him birth), that for someone who is considered a non-Muslim it was the Quran and his faith in Allah (remember he was legally recognised as a Muslim until 1972 when he and his community woke up one fine morning to find that the parliament and the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto government had legally changed their religion without asking them) that inspired him on a trail-blazing career in science, and that the Nobel Prize was just one of at least 16 globally prestigious science awards he won (see list in box) and for which he was feted far and wide except in his motherland.
Salam — who should have been celebrated in Pakistan for his achievements for the country he remained loyal to until his last breath, rather than who his God was (who is the God of all) — is that rare man of science who is judged primarily for his faith. And ironically while he had faith in both science and religion, his sadly numerous fellow-country detractors in Pakistan (he is pretty much universally acclaimed abroad) apparently have little faith in science or in the universal values of religion that assert countenance on the nature of goodness of man.
Salam was clear in his approach to science and how the Muslim world had an equal right, and responsibility, to pursue the discovery and understanding of the universe that God created. “Scientific thought is the common heritage of mankind,” he declared, asserting that rationality is not the prerogative of any one single religion. He was also clear about how the generally scientifically-backward Muslim world should develop their strategies. “It is just impossible to talk only of technology transfer. One should talk of science transfer first and technology transfer later; unless you are very good at science you will never be good at technology.” How smart! He was not your stereotype-steeped scientist either — he appreciated the beauty of the nature of beauty. He had this to say about this: “Whenever faced with two competing theories for the same set of observations, I have always found that the theory, which was more aesthetically satisfying is also the correct one.” Talk about finding faith in science!
While he did not wear his faith on his sleeve or make public pronouncements on religion despite the continuous negative references to his beliefs in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Ziaul Haq’s Pakistan, Salam was clearly firm in his beliefs and managed to see the God of one and all, in science: “As a scientist, the Quran speaks to me in that it emphasizes reflection on the Laws of Nature, with examples drawn from cosmology, physics, biology and medicine, as signs for all men.” The nearest a direct response on record to the questioning of his defence that he believed he was a Muslim, is this: “If you consider me to be a non-Muslim, so be it but permit me to lay a brick in the mosque you want to build.”
Salam saw religion as integral to his scientific work. He wrote: “The Holy Quran enjoins us to reflect on the verities of Allah’s created laws of nature; however, that our generation has been privileged to glimpse a part of His design is a bounty and a grace for which I render thanks with a humble heart.” During his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Salam quoted the following verses from the Quran: “Thou see-est not, in creation of the all-merciful any imperfection. Return thy gaze, see-est thou any fissure? Then return thy gaze, again and again. Thy gaze comes back to thee dazzled, aweary.” He then added: “This, in effect, is the faith of all physicists; the deeper we seek, the more is our wonder excited, the more is the dazzlement of our gaze.”
To study in schools that did not even have tables and chairs, it is remarkable how Salam remained studious in boyhood and shone very quickly as a young man. He was phenomenally brilliant as a student. Says his biography: “When he cycled home from Lahore , at the age of 14, after gaining the highest marks ever recorded for the Matriculation Examination at the University of the Punjab, the whole [home]town Jhang turned out to welcome him. His first paper was written as a student in this dusty but peaceful town [now, sadly, known for a less tolerant disposition] there in 1943 and concerned Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan – that brilliant sub-continental mathematician.”
Pakistan’s equally well-known, if not more – albeit much more loved – physicist is Dr Abdul Qadeer, who is considered the “Father of the [Pakistani nuclear] Bomb” and who is given credit for kickstarting the entire process of the country’s nuclear programme. However, few know that during the early 1970s, much before he won his biggest prize that made him world famous, Salam played a key role in starting Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). In 1972 two theoretical physicists working at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy that he set up, were asked by Salam to report to the PAEC chairman and set up the Theoretical Physics Group (TPG) that went on to design Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. The TPG, led by Dr Raziuddin Siddiqui, who was a student of Salam, completed work on the theoretical design of the bomb within five years. So how ironic that the “Islamic bomb” has a hand that was declared non-Muslim!
Salam was man of development and helped found and flourish major research and science development institutions. He helped set up Pakistan’s Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (Suparco), of which he was the founding director. He was also behind setting up five Superior Science colleges throughout Pakistan. But his best known and widely acknowledged contribution is that he founded and served as director (1964-93) of the prestigious ICTP in Trieste, Italy. Salam also founded the Third World Academy of Sciences. In 1959, he became the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society (at that time) at the age of 33. The Italian government after his death renamed ICTP as the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Pakistan, of course, ‘honoured’ him by ignoring him altogether. In a country where roads, stadiums, centers and even cities are named after foreigners, the only instance of the state acknowledging its illustrious son was including him in a series of postage stamps bearing portraits of Pakistani scientists.
Salam was born on January 29, 1926 (he would have celebrated his 83rd birthday this week) and passed away at the age of 70 on November 21, 1996 in Oxford after a prolonged bout of illness. As per his will, his body was flown to Pakistan for burial. He was laid to rest in Rabwah. While 30,000 attended his funeral, there was no one representing either the state that he loved so much, the government or the scientific community that he helped so much, at his funeral. This man of science was buried without official protocol from the state, next to his parents’ graves. The epitaph on his tomb initially read “First Muslim Nobel Laureate” but, because this state discriminates between its subjects on the basis of religion, as enshrined in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a local magistrate ordered removed the word “Muslim” leaving the farcical citation “First Nobel Laureate”. A state that puts no faith in science cannot advance – name one Muslim country known for its knowledge prowess or technological edge. The state of Pakistan may have refused to own this illustrious son of the soil as the world’s first Muslim to win a Nobel prize in science but it is sad that it also refuses to honour him as the Muslim world’s first Nobel prize winner.
Judgement Day by Adnan Rehmat
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Elected governments in Pakistan are rarely ousted by voters (Musharraf and Shujaat’s PML-Q being the only such specimen). More often than not this task is undertaken with relish by the military through armed coups. Or by one elected government against another through Governor Rule, the PPP turning this into an art form, having employed this dubious instrument in all instances of the country’s history save one. Either way, the pandemonium in Punjab is more than a just court case about the eligibility of the Sharif brothers – the bench was also on trial.
What makes this no ordinary a verdict is that Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif have not just been declared ineligible for membership of legislatures but also that neither can the elder brother become prime minister or chief minister nor the younger brother chief minister again. Both also stand disqualified from being formal leaders of their Pakistan Muslim League-N. This is effectively a knockout of the Sharifs from formal politics since they have lost power, lost membership of legislatures and lost leadership of the country’s second largest party.
This raises the issue of whether the courts should have the power to decide who can and who can’t become the country’s leaders and the leaders of political parties. While justice, they say, is blind – the laws currently in force helped the bench deliver this shocker – surely the judges are not. How can they have ignored that while legal decisions can address a temporary situation, lasting acceptance comes only through legitimacy of trust. The final verdict lies with the people. At least four times has Pakistan’s superior judiciary legalized martial law (twice by Musharraf) and at least thrice declared the sacking of elected governments and prime ministers by military backed presidents as valid. At least once the same court ordered an elected prime minister swing on the gallows. See how history views these verdicts now. Have we really produced judges without vision? The people of Pakistan deserve better.
And if the latest ‘big’ verdict is such a fine example of universal values, why are the sweetmeat shops deserted? It is peculiar that even though many see the PPP being the immediate beneficiary (considering it has a shot now at coming to power for the first time in over 30 years in Punjab), where is the jubilation of the triumphant? The reaction from all quarters in Pakistan to the verdict is either anger or shock even though the court’s verdict was Pakistan’s worst kept secret for weeks. Not even PPP leaders seem happy. Why this near universal non-satisfaction with ‘justice’ having being delivered?
PPP ministers and other leaders are avoiding giving responses to the verdict apart from a muted mumble here and there about respecting court verdicts even though the Supreme Court delivered a death sentence on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, which is now rejected by not just this but many other parties also. It appears that even if the PPP leaders are not sad at the prospects of their biggest political rivals knocked out of electoral politics, they don’t seem happy either. If the ruling party is not happy at the disqualification of the Sharifs and had not courted this then the question arises as to who gets to really gain from this development? No less that Khurshid Shah, a senior ruling party leader, says the ‘establishment’ in particular and ‘non-democratic forces’ in general, who do not want the supremacy of democratic forces and sovereignty of parliament as these are the only danger to them, will benefit.
The impact of the verdict in this case will extend beyond a legal interpretation that is as controversial as it was expected. Whatever the technical aspects or merits of the verdict, the already controversial Supreme Court has become even more contentious. Its reputation has been dealt a crippling blow even as an institution several judges and thousands of lawyers seek justice for its deposed top judge. How to reconcile the fact that an army chief topples an elected government and he is given legitimacy and not just that; a serving general is allowed by the same court to be eligible for public office and yet a party and its leaders elected by millions of voters are considered ineligible for representation.
Justice, after all they say, not only should be done but also needs to be seen to be done. Perceptions are important. People will always connect the dots. The connection between judges having sworn an oath of allegiance to a military ruler and providing him relief is clear. Judges who refused were sacked. That was clear. Also transparent is the fact that the judges sworn in by Musharraf have not been removed by the current rulers even when they had promised to do so. It is no surprise that not just the aggrieved party (the Sharifs and their PML-N) but also the people in general see a connection between the current judges and the controversial verdict they have handed out and support to them extended by the PPP in their ‘legal’ defense.
Barely 50 hours before the verdict Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani and Shahbaz Sharif in a meeting had agreed to make joint efforts to make the parliament supreme over all other institutions. Clearly, the Supreme Court verdict is a message for Gilani that his is not the station for such lofty ambitions, which do not suit his party colleagues higher in hierarchy than him.
Sharifs have alleged that Asif Zardari is singularly behind the Dogar Court’s verdict. The PPP may pooh-pooh this charge but for a verdict that stretched for eight months and was handed down the day after Zardari returned from China so he could conveniently take the next step to taking control of Punjab makes it hard to ignore PML-N’s suspicions.
Had the government wanted, it could have prolonged the case through its attorney general so as to at least see through the long march and the sit-in planned by the lawyers and keep the PML-N away from adding muscle to this popular movement. But considering the closing arguments of Latif Khosa in the case against the Sharifs, few can doubt that a select band of the PPP leadership carefully planned to convert Punjab into a political battleground and to plough its best horses into the course.
But where’s the calculation of the fallout of the Sharifs’ knockout? Benazir Bhutto’s death triggered days of intense and violent protests but because she couldn’t be brought back, as her death was irreversible, the protests died down. But the PML-N and its supporters and voters are going to be around, as are the Sharifs, so it is hard to see that the protests will not be prolonged particularly when they join forces with the lawyers and those agitators par excellence – Qazi Hussain Ahmed’s Jamaat-e-Islami and Imran Khan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf. After all it’s best not to take lightly Nawaz Sharif’s pregnant threat that Punjab will not take this ’slap on its face’ lying down.
PPP’s connivance or not, any short-term gains for Zardari’s party will be a huge price to pay for the court’s pushing of Pakistan into the 1990s’ era of political destabilization, which centred on bringing down governments rather than governance. This can only mean that the establishment will reclaim an overwhelming influence once again on the national polity and claw back to the status of the chief arbiter of fates of major political parties. This, in turn, means that not just the PML-N but the PPP will also be the loser in the medium term. In the long term, though, the PPP will be the bigger loser as it assumes the perception of a force akin to the Muslim League faction led by Sharif in the time of General Ziaul Haq – hands in glove with the establishment – while the PML-N assumes the position once enjoyed by PPP, again in the time of Zia. How ironical.
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