Dawn
11 November 2007
A glimmer amid gloom
by Kunwar Idris
NOTWITHSTANDING his own view of himself as a statesman and an enlightened modernist in Jinnah’s mould, Gen Musharraf in substance remains a commando soldier who is constantly on the lookout to get the better of his unwary foe. Alongside, he is also now a politician of the general run who is, alternately, enamoured and scared of clerics in politics.
Both these traits, more of personality than of profession, show up in full measure in the Provisional Constitution Order and the Proclamation of Emergency that Musharraf issued on Nov 3. It was widely expected of him to act to circumvent, or that not being possible, defy the court order if it went against him.
But only a commando would have thought of a stratagem to avert the feared eventuality and at the same time to decapitate and divide the highest court of the land.
Gen Musharraf issued the PCO and proclaimed the emergency as the chief of army staff, and not as the president, so that he is not seen to be undermining a political system that he himself crafted, then nurtured for seven long years and which bears his personal stamp all the way. The two notifications of Nov 3 read together constitute nothing short of martial law.
But he refuses to describe it as such for the National Security Council he formed in the teeth of universal opposition was intended to block martial law for all times to come. The NSC was nowhere to be seen during the crisis nor met to applaud even after the event.
This is all about Musharraf being a commando of the army’s special elite group. He is also a latter-day modernist in politics who may like or loath clerics as the occasion demands but dreads them all the same.
The proclamation of emergency to which all the service chiefs and corps commanders are a party, but not the cabinet nor the NSC, has put in abeyance the entire Constitution. There is no ambiguity about it.
However, the PCO which is Musharraf’s sole handiwork as chief of army staff, keeps operative all such provisions of the Constitution that embody Islamic injunctions. Among the constitutional clauses specifically mentioned that remain in force is Article 260(3)(a), which is Pakistan’s own secular definition of who is, or is not, a Muslim.
The PCO in a manner curt and without qualms suspends all fundamental rights by which men live and breathe but does not risk the ire of the clerics on Ahmadis sneaking into the fold of Islam through the emergency door. And, imagine, Musharraf is the world fighter of extremism and torch-bearer of enlightenment at home.
The necessity and legality of the emergency will be long debated but the question of immediate and critical importance is how long will it last. The short and right answer would be as long, or as short, as it would take Musharraf, the commando, to persuade Musharraf, the politician, that his term as president of Pakistan for the next five years is secure.
Political parties so far have shown neither the will nor the inclination to build up popular pressure to force Musharraf to yield any ground.
The lawyers cannot do it alone even if they were to try. The demands of their profession are too compelling to sustain political protest for long.
Musharraf is shrewd enough to foresee that the current uneasy calm that has followed the initial outburst of anger and the universal condemnation of the way he has treated the judiciary will not last long.
The party propagandists hailing the emergency for saving the country and the plaintive information minister assuring Musharraf that he had written a new chapter in the history of democracy should be seen by him as no more than poppy talk.
Ministerial bravado apart, surely Musharraf realises that only elections and that too on January 15 and no later, will save his presidency and the country from falling apart. At this moment, the interests of the mainstream political parties and Gen Musharraf happily seem to coincide. After eight years, in the wilderness the parties that count would rather go to the hustings than take to the streets. And without new and solid political backing, Musharraf, too, knows he would not last in office either.
An unintended but welcome benefit flowing to the people out of the loss of their rights and the enormous, though not unprecedented, humiliation of the Supreme Court is that Musharraf secure in his office has acquired a vested interest in fair polls.
Apparently, he should have no reservations in working with any party or alliance of parties — mainstream, Islamist or nationalist. With the millstone of the sycophantic Q League no longer around his neck he should be gallant enough to face a bristling opposition led, very likely, by Shahbaz Sharif.
Surely, he will not miss the company of the Chaudhries of Gujrat or of Sheikh Rashid, the scion of Rawalpindi, who despite his cigar and swagger has carved a niche of his own in the capital’s street politics. Musharraf would be shooting himself in both feet — of the commando and the politician — if he were to be persuaded by the maulvis or Chaudhries to postpone the polls or to rig them. It would spell disaster for his career in politics and for democracy in the country.
As for the indignity heaped on the judges, the Supreme Court shall have to live with this scar too as it has with the deeper scar of Rafiq Tarar’s Quetta shuttle, the raid of goons on the court building and its warring benches of 1997. Just to refresh the public memory, the champion of today’s judicial integrity and independence and then the prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, gloated over all these sordid episodes 13 years ago. If the nation can get over the nostalgia of the times of Justices Cornelius and Kiyani, the Supreme Court of a kind would still be there.
The saddest thought arising in these sad times, however, is that while the soldiers and mercenaries alike are revelling in their triumph over the Supreme Court, one Fazlullah’s rabble has occupied Swat while all those whom Musharraf had empowered have vanished in the rarefied atmosphere of that picturesque valley.
The judiciary has indeed been humiliated but the state itself has been put to shame.
