He said, she said…

How hard is all this to untangle, really? The president says he told his staff to return the Official Secrets (Amendment) Bill 2023 and the Pakistan Army (Amendment) Bill 2023 to parliament without approving them.

His principal secretary (PS) says no such thing happened, and the president definitely did not disapprove of the bills in writing, which has been his usual practice – for five long years, no less.**

But bear in mind that then, when the president dismissed the PS and the latter wrote him a letter explaining his position and no other senior bureaucrat was willing to work at the presidency, it was still the PS that asked for an open inquiry, not the president.

Even though it was his job, as the ceremonial head of state and also the supreme commander of the armed forces, to shut the whole thing down and order an inquiry into how and why, and at whose behest, the highest office in the federation was undermined like this.

Instead President Alvi went no further than holding Allah as his witness and tweeting about being betrayed by his staff, that too more than 24 hours after every soul in the country knew that the bills had become law. So, one of the two is clearly lying.

And since it’s about two pieces of very controversial legislation – the exercise at the heart of representative democratic governance – and also about ridiculing the office of the president and humiliating the country all over the world, a bigger shock is that the Aiwan-e-Sadr did not take immediate legal action and hasn’t taken any legal action yet either.

The silence itself says a lot. The PS made his position clear enough in the letter, while the president chose to stay mum, so we’re left to put two and two together till there is a formal investigation.

Suppose this time the president decided, for whatever reason, not to put his objections down in writing – even though a paper trail would have killed any designs of conspiracy there and then – and asked his secretary to return the bills. He may not like to disclose the reasons for departing from his own precedent right now, but eventually he will have to explain why he gave only verbal orders this time.

Then it was the house’s turn to overplay its hand and take the no comment from the presidency as deemed assent, contrary to the constitution.

This, actually, is what gives the presidency material legal grounds to overturn said laws, yet the president’s tweet apologised to the people that would be affected by them. Invoking God’s mercy instead of the law of the land, as per its constitution, will also have to be explained during an inquiry.

Sifting through the usual noise, it’s not hard to understand that this is between two conflicting narratives. One says that the country’s most powerful and potent force (read the establishment) wanted these bills made into laws and went so far as pulling strings inside the president’s office to get the job done.

The other says that PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf), with its back against the wall, leveraged its man in the presidency to exploit loopholes in the constitution with the aim of using its social media hordes to amplify the impression that the establishment was undermining it.

Indeed, in the days before May 9, the second narrative would have built formidable momentum just because of the online push. It is still finding strong support from expat Pakistanis that make for PTI’s loudest mouthpiece, but nothing like (what is already) the old days.

Now, as this matter is investigated – which it most certainly will – it will not only give us an unprecedented constitutional crisis but also push us into uncharted political territory.

Either the country’s top court will expose the establishment’s ingress as going too far this time, undermining even the presidency, or it will reveal that PTI has been lying to the people and subverting the constitution, even disgracing the establishment and the country itself in the international press, just because it was stung by losing power and wants it back; at any cost.

Let’s not forget that a big bulk of the 240-250 million Pakistanis, most of them quite poor, don’t really give a toss about how the constitution dictates presidential assent in legislation. They want something done about record inflation and unemployment and are worried that now, as always, this fight at the top of the food chain will only make life worse for them. “We the people” also understand just why financial markets tumbled as soon as President Alvi fired off his tweet.

Once again this fight among politicians and institutions – he said this, she said that – exposes our public representatives as clowns, amateurs at best, divorced from reality and unfit for all the offices they hold.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023