Life after the Long March

Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry has been restored and that is a most welcome development for all the right reasons in the world. Now the Zardari government should have space to move forward and address other pressing issues. And since the opposition has accepted the government’s decision as befitting, we could go back to a situation of more political harmony, an absolute necessity at a time of grave crises.

The announcement came from Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and the PMLN has taken no time to announce an end to the Long March and has asserted that it will now go to the restored Supreme Court to back up the government appeal for a review of the verdict of disqualification against the Sharif brothers. It is a measure of the confidence reposed by the PMLN in Prime Minister Gilani that the party is now ready to face the Court it had so far refused to recognise. A review petition has to go to the very bench that has delivered the adverse judgement.

These are signs that the nation should look at with satisfaction. Reconciliation has finally taken place and hawks on each side have had the measure of each other. No one was in favour of this confrontation and public opinion was moving to the middle, accusing both the mainstream parties of regressing to the vendettas of the 1990s. The PPP has to be praised for crossing the Rubicon of restoration; the PMLN has to be praised for standing firm on its declared intent that it did not want to topple the government but desired only to get the judiciary restored.

Democracy and its “politics” have won the day. The deadlock has been broken through a political decision to accommodate each other. The “purists” who still fear backsliding and hidden agendas have been ignored by the celebration that has followed the decision to call off the Long March. Prime Minister Gilani has referred to the Charter of Democracy in his brief address, which means that he expects the PMLN to cooperate with him to bring about the judicial reforms pledged through an amendment in the Constitution.

The Long March elements that wanted a “revolution” to come out of the agitation have been disappointed. Qazi Hussain Ahmad of the Jama’at-e Islami has complained that once again the two mainstream parties have “made a deal” without consulting him over how to respond to Mr Gilani’s announcement. He said that his party had fought manfully for the cause in Lahore and had suffered injuries while facing up to the police near the GPO, but was left in the dark about the final decision to call off the agitation. He is of the view that the return of Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry to a court bristling with PCO judges is not a fair deal.

The lawyers are overjoyed and deserve their moment in the sun because of the way they have steadily carried the standard of their principled cause for over two years. Organised in over 106 districts in the country with elected bars that can raise funds and organise protest marches, they are a civil society instrument with more grassroots discipline than the political parties. They have now to sit down and decide how they will undo any possible negative consequences from their empowerment vis-à-vis the courts in which they appear.

Meanwhile, we have to face the question of “what next”. That means letting go of the rhetoric that the restoration of the judges in the higher judiciary will lead to justice in the country. The focus now should be on structural change in the entire judiciary, reaching down to the district level. The magistracy has to be merit-based, better remunerated, and defended against all sorts of pressures. This is particularly important because the former PMLQ government had failed to complete this reform despite the considerable financial assistance provided it by the Asian Development Bank. That is the only way “justice” will be “restored”.

Life after the Long March will hopefully see restoration of the economy that was severely damaged by the political instability radiating from the campaign. Once the result of the review petition has brought about a further thawing of the situation, it will be time to take a serious look at the problem of terrorism and the battle against it that we are not winning. (Daily Times, Editorial)

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Expectations after justice

By Asha’ar Rehman
Tuesday, 17 Mar, 2009 (Dawn)

The large crowd that threw its weight behind Mian Nawaz Sharif must definitely have played a part in the decision to restore Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Period.

A housewife in Lahore is waiting for inflation to dip sharply and the law and order situation to improve drastically before she goes on her next shopping spree. Advocate Asma Jahangir reminds Asif Ali Zardari that his and his party’s election last year was not an end in itself but that the PPP was supposed to actually bring in democracy after it came to power.

A similar task now challenges the chief justice — he must now work to bring in justice, at least the rule of law. But, of course, post-celebration, the people need to be chastened against coming up with unreasonable demands for the just-freed judiciary.

It is doubtful that the cautious words spoken by Athar Minallah are going to be good enough to hold back a people whose expectations have been raised so high. But surely, while Mian Shahbaz Sharif also warns the crowd to not expect streams of milk and honey to flow in this land, the more principled amongst us would be inclined to believe that a certain level of lawfulness will be maintained. Now that the judiciary is free, it is not too much to expect that Punjab will be getting rid of its police encounters.
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Asha’ar Rehman: Punjab in a federation

Punjab in a federation

By Asha’ar Rehman
Thursday, 26 Feb, 2009

A: “Today I have everything… government, power (?), backing of the global masters (??). You…What do you have?”

B: “I have the people.”

If it weren’t for the solemnity that a still fresh Supreme Court verdict is required to be met with, we would be laughing all the way to Lahore’s Charing Cross. Governor rule has been imposed on Punjab. Get ready to celebrate the basant spring festival, we are living in the kingdom of Salman Taseer.

A and B have swapped roles one more time. Circumstances have placed the fate of the Sharif brothers in the hands of President Asif Zardari. Mian Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif are dependent on Mr Zardari for their ‘re-entry’ into politics — dependent on the issuance of a Provisional Constitutional Order to get into the assemblies and getting the slots of the prime mister and chief minister for a third time? Unless they decide to bank on the people to gatecrash on their behalf.

Legal experts say the disqualified duo, or their ‘proposers’ and ‘seconders’, can ask for a review of Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision that has shaken the country but they do not expect a reprieve. If any kind of relief is to come to the Sharifs in the present set-up, it will have to accrue from the presidency or the parliament where Mr Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party is in a majority. Even hopes of some kind of engagement within the parliament were dashed the moment Mr Nawaz Sharif came up with his reaction to the Supreme Court verdict. He is in no mood to connect to the president whom he accuses of stabbing him in the back. He does not want charity. He wants war and can do with lawyers while judges rule against him.

The Sharifs pointedly blame Zardari (and significantly not his party) for bringing this on the country. They say the president, who sports a far from perfect image in public, had offered them a deal which they turned down. At the press conference on Wednesday, Nawaz Sharif also questioned the wisdom of the people who advise Mr Zardari these days, basing his comment on the premise that the president has influenced the court in giving the verdict against him and his brother. That is open to inquiry. What doesn’t require a genius to figure out is that the decision will have calamitous effects on the affairs of the Punjab province.

The first part of this article was written in September 2008 in the wake of the presidential election. This today is the other side of the story. The September bit focussed on how the presidential election had isolated the biggest province from the three smaller units in the federation as the Pakistan Muslim League-N insisted on fielding its own candidate against Asif Zardari, a consensus candidate of Sindh, Balochistan and NWFP. It was argued that the PML-N achieved nothing by running counter to the wishes of the smaller provinces other than adding to the sense of acrimony that existed in the smaller federating units against Punjab’s alleged hegemony. If the PML-N wanted to reconfirm its support in Punjab, it could easily have done so by abstaining from the presidential poll, thereby symbolically showing its willingness to tag along the other three provinces.

The PML-N thus chastened, the belief among some circles in Lahore was that, contrary to some statements, the presidential poll was no epitaph for the PML-Q, that it only reasserted the importance of the League group led by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi. There was also a word of caution for the PPP that the time for it to lay a claim on ruling Punjab at the head of a coalition had long passed. Now the Supreme Court’s decision in the disqualification case may have been taken on merit; politically, it’s clear that the warnings sounded from time to time since the general election in February 2008 have gone unheeded.

The PPP (or more significantly the president) now seeks to control Punjab through the governor -- disregarding the mandate the people had given to the PML-N in the election. The imposition of the governor’s rule denies the PML-N an opportunity to immediately replace the disqualified chief minister Shahbaz Sharif with another man from within the party. The PML-Q stands resurrected, if it was ever dead, as its 80-odd members hold the balance if and when the governor rule is lifted and assembly members, the true representatives of the people of the province, are allowed to resume their term. Above all, the federal government is guilty of isolating Punjab, of naively thinking that it can go along wielding power merrily without stability in Punjab, amid powerful voices from NWFP and Balochistan that condemn the supposed sidelining of the Sharifs. The governor’s rule, the whole situation that has emerged following Wednesday’s court ruling, defies all logic. The Sharifs may have lost in the court, but publicly they seem to have stolen a march on a president bent upon jeopardising his existence. The indecisive period is over. Reconciliation is no more. (Dawn)

PML-N 50 MPAs short of simple majority

LAHORE: Members of the Punjab Assembly belonging to the PML-N called a session of the Punjab Assembly in an apparent show-of-strength move after the proclamation of governor’s rule late on Wednesday, but were 50 members short of a simple majority. There were 136 members in the House. The PML-N members passed a resolution protesting against the Supreme Court verdict declaring their leaders Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif ineligible to be parliamentarians. staff report (Daily Times)

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Against the law of popular politics - By Asha’ar Rehman

THE mere locking of horns with the government is no more acceptable to lawyers in Lahore. They locked up the lower courts in the city on Nov 4. The Lahore High Court has taken suo motu notice of the extreme action and has angrily asked the Punjab government to do its duty of standing by the law. On Friday the case was adjourned for an indefinite period.

The lawyers are looking to revive their movement. Their campaign, initially for the restoration of the judiciary but later on aimed at the return of Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry as the chief justice, had lost some of its steam. The government had managed to contain the lawyers’ advance by bringing back many of the judges who had been deposed by the November 2007 Provisional Constitution Order issued by Gen Pervez Musharraf.

Even the leaders of the ‘free judiciary’ caravan appeared worried by the government’s approach which was spearheaded by Law Minister Farooq Naek and Attorney General Latif Khosa. Chastened by the increasing control of the pro-PPP lawyers over the powerful Pakistan Bar Council, Messrs Aitzaz Ahsan, Hamid Khan and Ali Ahmed Kurd came up with a national coordination council of their own to run the movement.

The move may have been liable to criticism since it amounted to creating a parallel, even if pro-judiciary, system of command among the lawyers. It could also have been interpreted as an attempt by a few to monopolise the lawyers’ leadership, guarding against the Pakistan Bar Council as well as against the possibility of a government nominee somehow managing to succeed in the election of the Supreme Court Bar Association which was around the corner.

The step didn’t generate any controversy in the legal circles — no debate was sparked off — mainly because of the sheer number of lawyers willing to fight the government on this one. The strength of the anti-Zardari, previously anti-Musharraf, lawyers was reflected in the SCBA election late last month.

While some observers were expecting a real battle between Ali Ahmed Kurd and PPP-sponsored M. Zafar for the SCBA presidency, it turned out to be a tame affair. The fears of rigging expressed by Aitzaz Ahsan proved to be a false alarm as Mr Zafar failed to make too much of an impression — even in areas where the pro-PPP lawyers were supposed to wield some influence. The big margin of victory provided Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s soldiers the strength needed to ward off the onslaught of the government.

On the other hand, the inaction of the government is a boon for lawyers. Stability has been lacking ever since Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani took oath as the prime minister in March this year and those who had been hoping for a turnaround in fortunes with the rise of Asif Ali Zardari to the presidency have been frustrated.

The government has failed to come up with certain popular measures that could have pushed the issue of the judiciary into the background. The PPP government is yet to come up with a plan for the general good of the people. Instead it has been caught up with the task of creating and strengthening alliances inside the parliament.

It has also drawn flak from the general public for being obsessed with blessing its own people — from those who had the good luck of accompanying Mr Zardari to jail in the past to the so-called political appointees given jobs by the previous PPP governments and sacked by subsequent regimes. If that was not evidence of parochialism on the PPP’s part, we now have in the garb of ministers people who have the nerve and the audacity to defend in the parliament acts as horrendous as honour killings.

This is where the reconciliation initiative that Mr Zardari inherited from his wife has badly gone wrong, and it will most certainly contribute both to the negative image his party is fast building for itself and the lawyers’ movement which remains a big challenge for the government. The tribal-like relationship that Mr Zardari seeks to establish with those he wants to appease disenfranchises the people at the heart of his party. PPP leaders have been repeatedly pleading for time to set the affairs of the state right. They must realise that no amount of time can benefit them if the job was entrusted to the wrong hands. In the meantime causes that Mr Zardari, Mr Naek and their associates seek to drown in ‘other important matters’ will continue to draw a large number of people.

If there was a Naekian scheme to neutralise the lawyers by the side of Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, it has not only failed, it has also further jeopardised the PPP’s chances of sailing smoothly in government. Today there is no shortage in Lahore of people who are justifying the locking up of the courtrooms by referring to a leadership that has a habit of going against public sentiment, of continuing in the footsteps of Gen Musharraf. An alternative strategy for Mr Zardari would be to approach the people at large rather than concentrate on the good of only a group on the basis of political affiliation. (Dawn)
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