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Friday March 29, 2024

A haunted history

By Ghazi Salahuddin
July 30, 2017

If you had not already taken sides and been emotionally involved in the entire affair, it would be difficult for you to make sense of Friday’s Supreme Court judgment. And while the deafening commotion of the moment will distract your thoughts, here is a perfect frame of reference for the impending observance of 70 years of our existence.

Ah, but we have consistently sought to hide from our history, shrouding it with slogans and nice-sounding shibboleths. For that matter, we are not concerned about having two histories – one that began on August 14, 1947 and the other that commenced in December 1971.

Irrespective of where we begin, the story of our prime ministers has an eerie pattern. None has been able to complete his or her complete constitutional tenure. Counting from 1947, Nawaz Sharif, with his three incarnations, is the 15th prime minister in this sequence.

All these departures have underlying similarities but have, of course, been scripted separately by authors who are not always attributed on the title page. In the present case, the sense of drama was built up with an unprecedented literary flourish even though the ending has come with the whimper of a petty crime.

Yes, the initial verdict of April 20 had included a reference to the ‘Godfather’ quotation – ‘behind every great fortune there is a crime’ – and on the way to Friday’s ouster of Nawaz Sharif, there was a fearsome citing of the Sicilian mafia. These vivid intonations appeared to be in sync with the awesome plot of the Panama leaks.

But the five-judge bench of Supreme Court, headed by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, has disqualified Nawaz Sharif from his post as the prime minister – not on corruption charges that would relate to the Panama leaks but on the basis of the discovery of a company of which Nawaz Sharif was chairman with a salary that he had not drawn.

This was a late discovery in the proceedings, made by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) constituted by the Supreme Court bench. Since Nawaz Sharif had not disclosed this information in his nomination papers for the 2013 general elections, he was deemed not to be ‘sadiq aur ameen’ under Article 62 of the constitution. As for the Panama leaks, the Supreme Court has directed NAB to file corruption references against a number of individuals, including Nawaz Sharif’s children.

Apart from questions that arise from the verdict and the manner in which it has been interpreted, we have to attend to the political ramifications of the removal of Nawaz Sharif. The most significant immediate impact is the vindication of the campaign that has so doggedly been pursued by Imran Khan. PTI supporters are understandably in a jubilant and upbeat mood.

Thankfully, Imran Khan was sober and restrained in his initial reaction. He said: “Today is the beginning of a new Pakistan and more big fish will be caught soon”. This, to be sure, is the big question: is this a new beginning? Will the process of accountability move forward in a judicious manner? And if this is a new beginning, where are we headed? After all, it is the national sense of direction that ultimately matters, regardless of the tensions that are embedded in the present political situation. We can expect a lot of sound and fury in the opposition’s thanksgiving rally today while the PML-N workers muse on the setback they have suffered. Their leaders are in a defiant mood, asserting the supremacy of the PML-N’s popular following. They have serious reservations about the verdict and some prominent legal experts have endorsed this view. A review petition is in the offing.

Nawaz Sharif’s ouster, incidentally, is not the end of the Sharifs’ rule. Shahbaz Sharif, Nawaz’s younger brother who has created the image of a dynamic administrator as the chief minister of Punjab, is expected to be the next prime minister after an interim arrangement. So there will be a sense of continuity during the next 10 months, until next year’s general elections.

This also means that the opposition would not be able to draw an early electoral benefit from the victory that it is celebrating today. A lot will depend on how the PML-N – which is still under the leadership of Nawaz Sharif – is able to mobilise its formidable base in Punjab. Meanwhile, there are other cases pending in the Supreme Court that may have serious consequences.

However, in the midst of all this turmoil and political discord, it is becoming difficult to look at the larger picture to visualise a future that is being shaped by a number of bewildering domestic, regional and global developments. We are aware of the whispers that are made to emphasise the conspiratorial aspects of the removal of yet another elected prime minister. It would be instructive to also look at our judicial history and revisit some crucial verdicts of our superior courts that changed the course of our political history. There is also a profound juxtaposition of the short lives of our prime ministers and the longevity of the military rulers. How would you, then, apportion the responsibility of leading Pakistan to its present position?

Going forward, 70 years after the birth of a nation that was truncated in its youth, it is the future of democracy that we should all be worried about. It is not easy to see whether Friday’s verdict has strengthened democracy or made it more vulnerable. In this discussion, we have never been short of antagonists who potentially refuse to accept the logic for the creation of Pakistan.

As an aside, I need to mention that on Thursday I attended a provincial consultation in Karachi on the implementation of the 18th Amendment that celebrates the principles of federalism and division of powers. A number of prominent legislators attended the event to share their views. The general sense was that attempts were being made to subvert this constitutional measure to improve the quality of democracy in the country.

One irony here is that despite introducing about 100 changes in the constitution, parliament in 2010 was not able to do away with the legacy of Ziaul Haq, such as Articles 62 and Article 63, because of opposition from the PML-N and some religious parties. In the larger context, constitutions have not worked well in Pakistan.

Perhaps we are not willing to realise that democracy and federalism are secular ideas, and religion and the state need to remain separate. This is the fundamental crisis of our identity and it is likely to remain this way even after the departure of Nawaz Sharif.

The writer is a senior journalist.

Email: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com