The miracle that did not happen

Islamabad diary

Some of us – I can’t say how many but a good number certainly, in this number included battalions of retired officers who are always waiting for miracles to happen – were eager for something to happen round about the end of October and the beginning of November.

The march on the capital – which as we know well by now did not quite turn out to be anything like Mussolini’s march on Rome when his Fascist Party seized power – we took to be the catalyst that would set things in motion. The capital would be paralysed, compelling the real battalions to move and the oligarchs to run for cover. No one quite spelled it out this way but this was the general outline of the miracle that was fondly, perhaps foolishly, expected to happen.

Two things happened instead. The march fizzled out before it began. It was a tactical blunder, a foolish masterstroke, to announce a march, and the capital’s seizure, beforehand. Even wars are not announced this way. You strike first, whether at Pearl Harbour or the invasion of Iraq, and make the formal declaration of war afterwards. That’s what cold start doctrine is all about – stealthy, lightning attack first and everything else later. Take away the element of surprise and before even the first shot is fired half your advantage is lost.

The threat to close down the capital was a favour to the government, forcing it to make preparations to stop the march. So it beefed up its defences and some backbone was put into the police forces and the constabulary which in 2014, facing a similar situation, had shown more agility in running away than standing their ground.

The crucial difference between then and now of course is that in 2014 the marchers, belonging to the PAT and the PTI, had entered the capital. The confrontations with the law-and-order forces came about thereafter. This time around the generalissimo of the march, the Mussolini of the moment, had announced a march without preparation – in effect a declaration of war without any divisions to throw into the field.

The advantage thus went not to the attackers, because there were none around, but to the defenders – and as any retired major can tell you, or a captain in my case, against an ill-prepared attack a defence becomes all-powerful. If Nisar Ali Khan, the interior minister, is now strutting about like a victorious Hermann Goering it is less because of his own generalship and more on account of the hopelessness of the attackers.

If PTI workers could enrol for short courses in Allama Tahirul Qadri’s advanced school of attack and tactics they would be the better for it. PAT workers are trained to think in terms of logistics and the requirements of food and transport (their secretary general, Khurram Nawaz Gandapur, is a Sword of Honour from the PMA). They don’t just go singing into the wilderness. And their female workers are no less dedicated to whatever their cause is than their male counterparts. One may care nothing for the Allama and his evangelism. But the toughness of his workers has to be admired.

The Jamaat-e-Islami has also produced tough and dedicated cadres. But the Jamaat-e-Islami espouses a very dry version of Islam which doesn’t suit all temperaments. PAT workers do not crack skulls, except perhaps when pushed against a wall as during the 2014 dharnas. Jamaat cadres have specialised in cracking the skulls of opponents on campuses and college grounds over the years. Many may be the causes of the decline and wreckage of Pakistani education but the Jamaat-e-Islami’s fervour, or that of its student body, figures high in this list.

Anyhow, the march prevented from taking place, there was no occasion for the battalions to move. So the miracle was stillborn and the oligarchs far from having to run for cover are basking in the notion, propagated by their acolytes, that the machinations against them not succeeding, they stand more powerful than before.

The oligarchs have already begun their counter-offensive. Their chosen instruments have succeeded in dividing the Pakistan Bar Council, and this body has questioned the Supreme Court’s authority to take up petitions relating to the Panama leaks under Article 184(3) of the constitution.

The oligarchs have always been good at sowing the seeds of such division. Back in 1998 when My Lord the then chief justice, Sajjad Ali Shah, initiated contempt proceedings against the then prime minister, the same Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, the oligarchs contrived two events: the storming of the Supreme Court and sowing the seeds of division in the ranks of their lordships, culminating in the unceremonious ouster of My Lord the Chief Justice at the hands of his brother judges.

If division could happen with that holy of holies, the apex court, where stands the Pakistan Bar Council? And presiding over this particular meeting of the Bar Council was the learned attorney general, Ashtar Ausaf Ali, for much of his working life family lawyer – or as godfathers would say, consigliere – to the oligarchs, now as reward for services rendered, principal law officer of the republic.

And a sop has been thrown to the battalions, the interior minister announcing that an eminence no less than a retired high court judge would head a commission to enquire into the ‘security leak’ carried by a newspaper which so upset the battle-hardened corps commanders.

The high priests of national security, it would be recalled – guardians of all frontiers, ideological, moral, geographical et al – were fuming about this purported leak. Now if they are to be satisfied with the toil and diligence of a retired high court judge it is easy to picture the oligarchs, behind closed doors, grinning from ear to ear…and intoning piously, but not without suppressed smiles, their favourite invocation, ‘Alhamdolillah’. The joke is on the guardians and they know it.

The oligarchs know their commissions and have a rich experience of them. When the cooperatives’ scandal broke out back in the 1990s – the oligarchs taking huge loans from cooperative banks they were not supposed to take, thus wrecking the cooperatives’ system – a commission headed by a Supreme Court judge gave them a clean bill of health. He later, after retirement, was a senator on their ticket.

The storming of the Supreme Court was examined by another retired eminence of the highest court and although the entire country knew who was behind that piece of theatre my lord could discover nothing.

Following the Model Town killings – 14 shot dead in cold blood, scores injured – with great fanfare a commission headed by a serving high court judge was announced to look into the matter. The oligarchs didn’t like his report when it was written. Where it now is, gathering dust on which shelf, Allah knoweth best.

Study the judicial history of Pakistan – from the earliest cases arising from the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly to Bhutto’s trial and hanging and the later dismissals of government by military as well as presidential fiat – and the conclusion that comes out plain is that politics, or the balance of forces, has always been superior to the letter of the law. Take it as the eleventh commandment of Pakistani jurisprudence.

Can it be any different in the case of the Panama leaks?

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com