Finding a way out

Asif Zardari has now offered to move a resolution for the reinstatement of deposed judges in a joint sitting of parliament. This is a departure from the PPP's earlier positions taken in a series of negotiations with its erstwhile coalition partner, PML (N). And he did not give any timeframe either, as he did not want the 'media to begin another countdown'.
Zardari has also tried to downplay the crisis stemming from the judges' issue that has rent asunder the ruling coalition, spawning political instability all along particularly in Punjab. Even after the sterile London parleys and the PML (N)'s ministerial resignations, there was a hope against hope that Zardari would do something at the last minute to save the coalition cabinet. That did not happen.
His words at his press conference at the Zardari House on Wednesday were, of course, an admixture of sweet and bitter but the message, fully reflected through his body language, was loud and clear: the PPP will not 'remove' the so-called PCO judges.
The riposte from Nawaz Sharif took no time in coming: the national reconciliation as espoused by Zardari is indeed a noble cause but it cannot be promoted at the cost of principles, he told a local television channel. With a mischievous smile on his face, he asked Zardari to join him for a ride on the "judicial bus", promising the Punjab government would raise no roadblocks.
As the judicial bus gets ready to undertake the journey, it is not hard to imagine the kind of tumult that is going to besiege the national politics with a long hot summer only adding to the people's misery.
Here is this weird situation where both sides of the unspoken but widely noticed state of divergence with a high potential of confrontation are equally right and pathetically stuck in their respective committed positions. They are prisoners of their words, so to say. Nawaz Sharif cannot agree to the PPP stance of amending the constitution through a parliamentary resolution-cum-constitutional bill package because being a part of such a process would concede constitutionality to President Musharraf's November 3 action.
In fact, the stance adopted by the PML (N) leader draws strength albeit vicariously from an open and widely reported admission by President Musharraf, in an interview to a foreign television news channel, that his actions of November 3, 2007 were unconstitutional. But since then a lot of water has flowed under the bridges. The new Supreme Court, sworn in as a follow-up of the President's action, has given its verdict in support of the President's action as a 'closed and past transaction'.
The apex court has the jurisdiction to regroup and review its judgement, but what if it does not. It would be unrealistic to assume that the present court would declare itself illegally constituted. It can also grant a stay order against a parliamentary-resolution based executive order seeking restoration of pre-November 3 situation - a possibility that Zardari has also hinted on different occasions.
All said and done, one must admit the ground reality and that is that there is no clear way out of this quagmire of discontent and disagreement. Surely, the present incumbents of the country's highest judicial positions would not like Pakistan to be consigned to the vortex of chaos and anarchy that the present judicial impasse threatens to spell.
Then there is the untold suffering inflicted upon the litigant public by courts at all tiers not being functional at their capacity levels, thanks to the lawyers' boycott in vogue for more than a year now. Since positions so far taken by the stakeholders brook no scope for an escape out of this nightmarish dilemma, there is the need for further consultations with more and more third party interventions to put in place a modus vivendi to resolve the judicial crisis.
Given the severity of multidimensional crises that beset Pakistan today, each one of us owes it to the country to help break, in whatever way one can, the impasse over the judges' reinstatement. And, more importantly, it is the leadership that has to rub off the edges of their perceptions, possibly sharpened by their personal egos. What is at stake are not the jobs of a few individuals but the future of Pakistan and its 160 million people.