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After the verdict

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Monday, 30 April 2012 04:39

There is much free-flowing contempt

Not unexpectedly, Yousaf Raza Gilani has been found guilty as charged for committing contempt of court by the Supreme Court. The special bench of the apex court has referred to Article 63(1) (g) of the constitution that may disqualify the prime minister from remaining in the parliament since he has bought “into ridicule the judiciary”.

Gilani has been accused of willful flouting, disregard and disobedience of the Supreme Court’s direction in the NRO (National Reconciliation Ordinance) case. Put in plain language, the prime minister has been convicted for adamantly and consciously refusing to write a letter to the Swiss authorities to reopen corruption cases against the president.

In the immediate aftermath of the initiation of contempt proceedings against him, Gilani put a rhetorical question to me: Would Shahbaz Sharif write a letter to convict his brother Nawaz Sharif if asked to do so by the worthy judges? He added that he would not write a letter to convict Zardari come what may!

The PPP has assumed the moral high ground in the face of the conviction of the prime minister. Its strategy simply put is to portray Gilani as a martyr and the party as a victim of the shenanigans of a biased higher judiciary.

The party’s political opponents and critics in the media have also invoked morality in calling for Gilani to immediately resign. The leader of the opposition Ch Nisar Ali has gone even further by threatening on the floor of the House that he would not let Gilani take his seat in the parliament after the verdict.

The Pakistan Peoples Party’s case is simple. Its founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was convicted in a murder case by the Lahore High Court and subsequently hanged by General Zia-ul-Haq in April 1979. Jurists, and even his critics, now generally acknowledge that the Bhutto Trial was a gross miscarriage of justice and, hence, a “judicial murder”.

For the past four years, ever since the PPP has been in power, it has been at loggerheads with the higher judiciary. The judiciary, on the other hand, claims with some justification that its edicts have been deliberately flouted in order to get away with almost murder in matters of governance and transparency.

A powerful section of the media, the political opposition and traditional anti-PPP forces, in pursuance of their own agenda, have made common cause with a proactive higher judiciary and the Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Ifthikhar Chaudhry. Thereby, Zardari and Gilani have been successful in creating the perception that the PPP government is a victim of a deliberate witch-hunt as was the case in the past. Recent utterances of Master Bilawal and Ms Bakhtawar have further strengthened the victim syndrome.

Post the verdict, Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have called for immediate resignation of Gilani as, according to them, he no longer has the moral or legal right to remain prime minister. Sharif’s party will take a considered stand after its meeting scheduled for Monday.

Imran, however, wants to wait till all legal recourses by Gilani – including the right to appeal – have been exhausted. After that, he will embark on a “tsunami march” to Islamabad to oust him. Essentially, despite the hullaballoo, none of the parties want immediate elections.

The PPP leadership has never claimed to be a paragon of virtue. Elimination of corruption has never been its declared goal; rather far from it, the PPP leadership hasn’t even paid lip service to it while many of its ministers as well as the prime minister’s own family members are embroiled in corruption cases.

However, when the PPP’s political opponents invoke morality, they open themselves to the charge of having double standards; a selective morality perhaps tinged with amnesia. After all, what was so moral about accepting huge sums of money funneled by the ISI to launch an anti-PPP alliance in the nineties. Similarly, Sharif’s moves as prime minister to successfully intimidate and divide the apex court under Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah were bereft of any moral compunction.

Our political elite wallows in wealth and luxury. Would it be able to withstand independent scrutiny of its lofty living standards, which the hapless common man can only dream of?

Transparency and accountability cannot be inculcated without across the board consensus on its broad principles. Charges of corruption being frequently leveled by politicians against each other are bereft of any serious effort to initiate a credible system of answerability.

Involving the higher judiciary in settling essentially political scores can become a dangerous precedent. Clash of institutions (read inflated egos) can derail the entire democratic process.

Unfortunately, in the past, the higher judiciary has without exception appended its seal of approval on coupsters of all hue and colour. It has to be more careful now - lest by its actions it unwittingly throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. After all, in the end analysis, an independent judiciary is essential to democracy.

As a mark of protest against the verdict, PPP activists took to the streets in some cities of Sindh. On the other hand, Zardari has been claiming without much conviction that Gilani is being victimised because of his support for a Seriaki province.

It is obvious that the PPP has launched an election campaign on the basis of a court verdict that it terms as biased. Its strategy is to exhaust the process of appeal and possible disqualification of the prime minister for a few months and taking it to the point of time of announcing general elections.

Gilani’s lawyer, one of the champions of the restoration of an independent judiciary in Pakistan, Aitzaz Ahsan, has complained that his client was charged under civil contempt but has been convicted for criminal contempt. The matter will have to be decided by a full bench or a larger bench of the Supreme Court whenever Gilani appeals the verdict.

In the meanwhile, the ruling coalition should pay attention to governance issues. The economy needs urgent attention. Elections for a party in power for the longest period in the country’s history cannot be merely fought on slogans but will be fought on the basis of performance as well. This is where lies the rub.

The PPP can justifiably derive solace from winning a by-election in the Punjab Assembly constituency of Multan. Its candidate Usman Bhatti, an ordinary mazdoor, was able to beat the traditional grandee of the PML(N). But this just might be a flash in the pan. The general elections might be an entirely different story.
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Arif Nizami, Pakistan Today

It’s ‘it’

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Monday, 30 April 2012 04:24

No closure

When I heard the verdict against the prime minister in the contempt of court case, Akbar Allahabadi’s verse came to mind:

Muzzakar kay liyay ‘he’ hai, mouannas kay liyay ‘she’ hai;

Magar Hazrat mukhannas hain, na heeon mein na sheon main.

It’s a parody on the English words ‘he’ and ‘she’, while ‘mukhannas’ refers to eunuchs.

For male it is ‘he’, for females ‘she’;

But esquire is sexless, neither in the ‘hees’ nor the ‘shes’

The verdict is neither he nor she. It’s ‘it’. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani was convicted, but his punishment was detention in court till the judges choose to ‘rise’. It lasted 39 seconds. Having given their short order, the judges collected their wigs and gowns, rose and left, leaving the defence counsel speechless, to have his say later in a press conference. We are moving towards trial in media rather than by media.

What can I say? Why didn’t the judges go the whole hog, sentence the prime minister to six months and say that as a convict he is no longer eligible to be a member of parliament and thus no longer prime minister? It would have been clear and we would have gone on with our wretched existence. Instead, our confusion has been further compounded.

If the judges just wanted to make a token example of the high and mighty by showing them that they are not above the law, they only made our uncertainty more uncertain. If they sidestepped the issue of eligibility and threw the ball into parliament’s court, then we are in for the long haul and much errant nonsense. Perhaps the bench divided, resulting in something for everyone – punish the prime minister without really punishing him.

The contempt case was a sideshow. The real show is to get President Zardari thorough the Swiss courts and make him return the $60 million that he and his wife stole from the people.

Not a bad thought, but why depend on a foreign court? Why not order the Lahore High Court to start the retrial of the case that the Supreme Court had asked it to years ago? That court had found Zardari and Benazir guilty of corruption, but because of a taped telephone conversation between a judge adjudicating the case and a government official, it was rightly declared a mistrial by the Supreme Court, which asked the High Court for a retrial. It didn’t throw the judgment out. Why has that been hanging fire for years? Why throw the ball into the Swiss court instead?

The prime minister’s refusal to write a letter to the Swiss authorities to reopen corruption cases against President Asif Zardari despite repeated orders by the Supreme Court over two years led to the contempt. Gilani’s reasoning is not without merit: the president has immunity under the constitution while in office. By writing the letter, he would be violating his constitutional oath to preserve and protect the constitution by violating its Article about immunity. Those opposed to the Prime Minister’s contention dug up history: two of Islam’s greatest caliphs had presented themselves before a court. They forget that it was a court of their own state, not a foreign court of a non-Muslim country.

Those great caliphs would never have countenanced going to a foreign court nor been sent there by their own court. Forgotten is something more important: the concept of immunity does not exist in Islam. To provide constitutional immunity to certain state office holders in an Islamic republic is a violation of the faith. What is needed is an amendment of the constitution, instead of tying ourselves into knots.

The net result is that convicted prime minister or not, new prime minister out of this National Assembly or not, the letter will not get written so long as there is a People’s Party led government headed by a People’s Party prime minister. Q.E.D.

Our confusion gets further compounded while urgent cases remain pending and Pakistan hurtles into incremental chaos. This is what happens when a country is being led in every branch and at every level by hollow men, more interested in creating optics, enhancing their importance and expanding their jurisdictions than in solving the people’s basic problem of abject deprivation. Such people are themselves mukhannas ‘its’.

It would be unfair to write about the verdict until one has read the full judgment. But the question cries out: why did the Supreme Court reserve judgment in the first place? One would have thought that they did because they wanted to deliberate before arriving at a conclusion and release the full judgment the same day as the verdict was handed down. After all, this is not a case of Gangu Taili committing contempt.

It is the Prime Minister of Pakistan for God’s sake. Not good for the country or the democratic process that is evolving in fits and starts and which all today’s protagonists made such a big deal of in President Musharraf’s time. We are told that the judgment was delivered to the Speaker of the National Assembly that elects the prime minister and to the Election Commission last Friday, but I haven’t seen it yet.

How can the prime minister be removed?

1. He can be persuaded to resign by the president or his party for the greater good to avoid a tamasha. No surprise that many in the People’s Party are preening their feathers for the job, but only the one who pleases the president will wear this crown of thorns.

2. Being an ex-convict, does he attract the article in the constitution pertaining to ineligibility? The Election Commission can determine this but only if the Speaker of the National Assembly refers the matter to it. The Speaker can only do so if parliament asks her to. And then she can take a month to decide.

3. He loses a no-confidence vote, which is up to the opposition that doesn’t have the numbers.

What are the prime ministers options? He can buy time, but only for a time. It seems difficult how he will get out of this one for long. He has made a defiant speech in the National Assembly saying that he will not leave office unless the Speaker asks him to. He can buy time by:

1. Going into an intra-court appeal, which means to another bench in the Supreme Court comprising other judges. It is unlikely that another bench will embarrass its brother bench even if the prime minister’s appeal has merit. But the PM could buy a lot of time in so doing.

2. He asks the National Assembly for a vote of confidence which he will get.

3. He calls elections; the People’s Party plays victim-victim at which it is champion, and wins. However, that doesn’t get rid of his conviction so whether Gilani can contest or not is moot.

4. He gets super defiant and asks parliament to ratify his Executive Order restoring the sacked judges. Parliament refuses to do so and the judges are out again. That would mean war, serious war, between the three branches of government.

The National Assembly, representing the will of the people, elects the prime minister and only the National Assembly can throw him out. Parliament is the only institution higher than the Supreme Court and that is where the PM can and should go. It is about time parliament stamped its authority on the state instead of being a rubber stamp.

It would make for a head-on-clash between the legislature and the judiciary but it’s also about time that we clearly demarcate the boundaries of the jurisdictions of the three branches government. It’s not the Durand Line. Let’s determine who runs the country, the executive, the legislature or the judiciary or all three together within their strictly demarcated domains. Just when the country needs stability most, the three branches of government are busy destabilising it like Mafiosi in turf battles. But they’re not Mafiosi, they’re institutions that some ignoramuses call ‘pillars of the state’, forgetting that an Islamic state has only two pillars, God and the people, His vicegerent.

They should realise that they’re preparing the ground for yet another extra-constitutional intervention that people will welcome. But this time it may not be led by a four-star general.
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Humayun Gauhar | Pakistan Today

Pakistan issued tsunami warning after Indonesia quake

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Thursday, 12 April 2012 09:11

Revision of ties with US

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Thursday, 29 March 2012 22:40

UNFOLDED by Chairman of the 16-member Parliamentary Committee on National Security, Senator Raza Rabbani, the recommendations on the revision of the terms of engagement with the US are unprecedented in Pakistan’s foreign policy decision-making record.

First, it is rather positive that parliament has ably come up with its inputs in the foreign-policy-making process, which, as history amply demonstrates, has been directed by the military-civil bureaucracy without any major exception.

Furthermore, it is encouraging for another reason: a comprehensive set of contours of our future relationship with the US has been effectively laid down.

This development ought to be seen in a wider perspective. It should be seen in the perspective of future relationship with the US, and not solely as a note on the bygone phase.

In this regard it would, therefore, not be an exaggeration to state that Pakistan will gain the most out of it. In addition, the ‘mistrust’ that has marred the strategic relationship will perhaps wither away.

Besides, it will help strengthen the erstwhile strategic partnership between the two states. The fact is that the mistrust which marred the relationship has primarily been a direct outcome of the absence of an agreed formula. The Raymond David case and
its effects on the partnership — and a number of other instances — bear the above argument out.

In the second place, if one looks at the underlying causes of deterioration of relationship, it becomes explicitly clear that most of the factors have been addressed in the 16-point report of the PCNS.

The other issues are of paramount significance in bringing the two allies closer and back to the table.

In a nutshell, the development should neither be understated, nor should it be overstated. Instead, it ought to be agreed upon — though with alterations, if needed.

SYED GOHAR ALTAF
Islamabad

A neutral Afghanistan

THIS is apropos of the letter ‘A neutral Afghanistan’ (March 19). While broadly agreeing with the writer’s suggestion that a ‘neutral Afghanistan is in the interest of the region’, I disagree with his overall view which failed to take cognisance of the domestic and international fallout of Pakistan’s Afghan policy during the last few decades.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have a long history of troubled past relations, oscillating between mistrust and stability. Pakistan, after adopting a ‘defensive policy’ vis-à-vis Afghanistan in the initial decades, began to pursue an ambitious strategic agenda in Afghanistan during the course of Afghan Jihad. Brimming with self-confidence in the wake of the Soviet defeat, the military establishment extended support to the Pakhtun Islamists of Afghanistan in order to curb Pakhtun nationalism, train and indoctrinate recruits for the Kashmir jihad, achieve strategic depth, and open up trade route to the resource-rich Central Asia.

It temporarily achieved some of these objectives but at a great national and international cost.

Regionally, Islamabad’s support to the Taliban adversely affected its relations with Iran, Central Asian Republics, Russia and even China.

Internationally, the Taliban’s mediaeval laws, ties with Al Qaeda, repressive gender policies, and very poor human rights record embarrassed Pakistan and increased its isolation.

The changed geopolitical realities of the post-9/11 world provided Pakistan an opportunity to repair its tainted international image and begin a new chapter of cooperative ties with Afghanistan and other regional players. It, however, squandered this opportunity by continuing to maintain links with the Islamic extremists.

In the post-Taliban period, Islamabad, pursuing a two-track policy, kept on providing tacit support to the Afghan Taliban while simultaneously claiming to be pursuing peace and stability in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, it repeatedly voiced concerns regarding the growing Indo-Afghan nexus. Its concerns were genuine as far as India’s role in fomenting unrest in Balochistan was concerned. But, given its own record of meddling in others’ internal affairs, Pakistan failed to draw assertive international attention to the issue. Besides, Pakistan’s desire for a stable western border and a friendly, or at least neutral, regime in Kabul was entirely understandable and might have evoked international sympathy had Islamabad pursued the right and proper means for achieving it.

Suffice it to say, Pakistan’s unsure Afghan policy has produced extremely undesirable consequences both at home and abroad.

Not only has it hit a blow to Islamabad’s relations with all the important regional and extra-regional players but also left it friendless in Afghanistan where the Pakhtuns and non-Pakhtuns equally view it with scepticism.

With the end-game approaching, Pakistan needs to engage in a constructive dialogue with the Afghan government, the US, and other regional countries.

Only a policy aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people will ensure a neutral Afghanistan.

RAFIULLAH KAKAR
Lahore