The Federal Cabinet on Monday decided to ask president Zardari to file a reference with the Supreme Court of Pakistan on the death sentence termed by great many as the 'judicial' murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979. The review will be filed under Article 186, which enables the President "to obtain the opinion of the Supreme Court on any question of law which he considers of public importance".
Of course, the contemplated reference has to be subjected to legality tests like Law of Limitation, as to what constitutes 'public importance' and definition of 'question of law'. How the apex court would respond to the presidential reference is beyond the scope of this piece. A number of opinions have been aired by legal experts, raging from the issue of jurisdiction for the second review to time limitation to interpretation of Article 186.
However, we tend to see the case in two perspectives - though independent of each other but to their commonality in attempting to address a historic wrong - legal and historical. Then there obtains today a third and unique opportunity for the people of Pakistan that today the judiciary is as independent and strong as never before. Naturally the position the court would take on the reference made by President Zardari would be accepted with open heart.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was not only the country's former head of state then prime minister, but also the founder-chairman of the PPP, then the biggest political party in Pakistan. The Lahore High Court decision to hang Bhutto was upheld by a split-verdict of the Supreme Court.
The confession years later by Dr Nasim Hasan Shah, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court that upheld the death sentence, in an interview on television, implied that the court acted in the way it did under tremendous pressure, which then could be of no other source than of General Ziaul Haq and, therefore, was in his hindsight a 'judicial murder'.
The fact cannot be overlooked that it remains a festering wound, that there is a kind of suffocation that the people of Sindh in general and the PPP workers in particular feel 32 years on and has to be addressed. One fine spring morning they received the body of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and buried post-haste under strict security arrangements, and the tragedy being so grim that the police officer who accompanied the body suffered a severe heart attack which took his life despite the Zia-ordered best medical treatment. For his followers it was an apocalypse.
A catharsis of the lingering suffocation is in order, and for that the present Supreme Court is the best court. It would be churlish to think that the present apex court is amenable to come under any kind of pressure which some quarters believe is the PPP leadership's main purpose.
No doubt, the PPP-led government is flouting some of the apex court's verdicts and even if believed that by making this reference to it would be putting a strong enough pressure on the court. Given the degree of independence and legal objectivity so clearly reflected from its judgements there is hardly a scope to think and believe that the Supreme Court would come under pressure.
In fact, on the other hand, it would cut a lot of ground from under the PPP's feet to keep propagating - by way of some of its leaders' crude insinuations and innuendos - that the PPP would never get justice from the courts. But, having said all this we cannot ignore the fact that all courts including the highest can go only as far as the law permits. The Supreme Court will judge the admissibility of the reference for reopening the former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's trial case in accordance with the dictates of the law on the statute book. We should accept that reality with open heart and mind.
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