EDITORIAL: It’s not just that the Supreme Court has upheld General Musharraf’s death sentence too late in the day, when he is already in his grave, or that he was tried for his 2007 emergency not the original 1999 coup, that leaves the job only half done.
And, to add to the ongoing argument about the need for self-reflection and wondering how democracy was so easily derailed so often in this country, things will only have begun to come full circle if the honourable lordships of the apex courts had also fixed blame on their own peers and their doctrines of necessity, without which no dictator would ever have been able to trample upon the law of the land.
Yet some manner of reflection is definitely warranted. So far, the national debate about dictatorships has never gone beyond condemning the actions of dictators. That is fair enough, but there’s also an urgent need to study the many weaknesses of other central pillars of the state.
For example, why has the superior judiciary always happily facilitated overt military coups and gladly looked the other way when the system is hijacked in more covert ways? And why did no axe ever fall on judges who betrayed their oaths and the country?
Parliament cannot escape blame either. If our political elite weren’t forever a house divided, always more eager to hurt each other than help the people, parliament would never have been reduced to the house of cards that it has been for decades. And if our democratic leaders were any good at their job, military dictators would never be able to boast better achievements in diplomacy and economics.
As far as the history of violations of the constitution and authoritarian dictatorships go, at least, parliament’s history is just as shamefully chequered as the judiciary’s.
For better or worse, the solution must also come from the legal fraternity. For, only the judiciary has the power to keep all institutions and everybody in them in complete check at all times.
All that is needed is certainty of justice. Unfortunately, though, these are times when not just political engineering is at play once again – and everybody just pretends not to see strings that are being pulled from behind the scenes – but Transparency International has put the judiciary alongside the police force as the most corrupt institution in the country.
So, once again, the more things change the more they stay the same. And even the apex court’s decision about Gen Musharraf’s death sentence does not change this paradigm.
There will be much debate, no doubt, but will parliament or democracy or the constitution be any better protected by a verdict that handed the death penalty to a dead man two and a half decades after his coup?
The best that can be done, as usual, is to hope for better times ahead. Hopefully, the so-called adventurers within us will finally lose appetite for politics. And hopefully the judiciary will neither delay nor deny justice any longer.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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