Ill-conceived gambit

The government has shot itself in the foot by launching an ill-conceived and hurried attempt to bring in a spate of Constitutional Amendments without proper disclosure, forging consensus on the proposed changes, or even ensuring it has the numbers in both houses of parliament to win the day.

Hurried calling of sessions of both houses over the weekend too proved a dud in the end because no homework or discussion inside parliament or outside had been carried out.

Since no written version of the proposed bill to carry out the Amendments was made public or even shared with members of parliament, the media and public were left grasping the few straws floating in the wind to wrap their heads around the government’s gambit.

A flurry of lobbying by the government did not produce the desired results. Short of 11 votes in the National Assembly (NA) and five in the Senate to cobble together the necessary two-thirds majority in both houses, the government’s desperate attempts to pull Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s Jamiat-e-Ulema-Islam-Fazl’s (JUI-F’s) eight and five votes respectively, and even Akhtar Mengal’s Balochistan National Party-Mengal’s (BNP-M’s) one and two respectively, finally came a cropper despite blandishments and (in the case of the BNP-M) threats.

The main content of the proposed Amendment focused on the judiciary. Under cover of tackling the huge backlog of cases in the Supreme Court (SC), a Constitutional Court was proposed to be set up to deal with constitutional and political issues, leaving the SC free to tackle the mountain of cases related to public issues.

In actual fact, according to informed sources and commentators, the government was having kittens regarding the impending retirement of Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Qazi Faez Isa next month and, under the present rules and procedure, the elevation of the senior puisne judge Justice Mansoor Ali Shah to the CJP’s chair.

When in such matters governments resort to the cloak-and-dagger, dark-of-the-night manoeuvres such as have been on display recently, it disrespects the incumbent outgoing CJP as well as his successor, since public opinion speculates that the former is considered ‘sympathetic’ to the government, and the latter not.

Judges may give verdicts that please one lot and disappoint the other, but their judgements speak for themselves, and if based on sound reasoning and the law, should command acceptance and respect across the board if judicial independence and credibility are to have any meaning.

At the heart of this matter is the 8-5 verdict of the SC regarding its order to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to award the 41 seats in the NA to the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) of those members who fought the elections not on the PTI’s ticket, but later declared themselves PTI members.

The SC has been constrained to issue a harsh reminder to the ECP to carry out its verdict and not prevaricate through dilatory and irrelevant tactics. This is indeed an unprecedented clash of these two state institutions. To add to the mess, the government’s proposed Amendment envisages the CJP being appointed from the five senior most judges, rather than the senior most in line. If this is not personalised proposed legislation, what is?

Other controversial aspects of the (now submerged) Amendment disallows appeals against military courts verdicts against military personnel or civilians. Obviously, this is aimed at the arrest and pending court martial of Lt. General Faiz Hameed (retd), with the added spice of the possibility of Imran Khan too being dragged into this bog.

What do all these shenanigans really mean? It has been the long standing policy of the establishment to resolve all issues regarding dissent or opposition through force rather than rational dialogue. This is the continuing state of affairs in Balochistan, which has pushed Akhtar Mengal to despair and resignation from parliament, is driving the youth of the province into the arms of the insurgents, and is unlikely to yield results different from the past, albeit perhaps increasingly worse.

Similarly, Imran Khan and the PTI’s travails at the hands of the establishment, added to immeasurably by the former’s Quixotic adventurism of May 9, 2023, is following the all too familiar pattern of pursuing the establishment’s aims in a manner so overdone that in time, it loses credibility.

Here too, the establishment is perhaps gnashing its teeth at not getting rapid results because of our justice system and its normal delays, as well as the complications in the cases against Imran Khan. The problem with this gung-ho approach, as the track record and current developments have once again proved, is that the more the establishment presses on this particular gas pedal, the more the results turn out to be the opposite of those intended or desired.

Pakistan’s political culture, for understandable reasons given our history, gravitates towards the actual or perceived underdog, irrespective of the latter’s qualities or lack of them. It is the visceral reaction of our people to the establishment’s role in denying the people genuine representation, credible upholding of rights, and the actual or threatened use of force and fear to get what the establishment wants. This is not an inspiring scenario, not from the past, certainly not from the present, and worryingly, the future nightmare of impending disaster.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024