Syed Talat Hussain

Issuing notifications contrary to the chief justice’s advice was always going to be a strategic disaster, dwarfing Kargil’s heights of folly. And that was exactly how it unfolded

(Till the writing of these lines the government had not withdrawn the contested notifications for the appointment of Justice Saqib Nisar as Acting Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court and Justice Khwaja Sharif as a judge of the Supreme Court. The article assumes that the government would have remedied the situation before the Supreme Court starts its proceedings on the case today.)

Three pictures in Tuesday’s newspapers were worth more than a million-word analysis of Pakistan’s glum political situation, foretelling worrying future trends.

One had President Asif Ali Zardari, wearing all the royal airs his designation commands, chairing a meeting, at the end of which assurances were given to party members that there was no chance of mid-term elections in the country. The other showed an earnest-looking Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani administering polio drops to a child in the firm custody of the mother, as a battery of fawning assistants display smiles more civilised societies would prefer to reserve for humanity-saving breakthroughs in medical science.

The third changed the scene dramatically. In the rough and rugged terrain of South Waziristan stood General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, with half a smirk, and three Mehsud tribesmen offering a promotional prayer for the success of two new road-construction projects inaugurated as part of the effort to quickly rebuild and develop the FATA region. All three men are important. Their words and deeds can make or break this country’s path to progress and security. The difference is that the first two are elected leaders, and are expected to be dynamic helmsmen, charting brave policy course for a bright national future. The last one is at best an implementer, an executioner of plans his political bosses draw.

But in reality, out of the three, only the general seemed to be at the right place at the right time and of his own volition. His civilian superiors, the president and prime minister, seemed so far away from where they ought to be, hopelessly out of sync with the times. And the pictures did not lie.

This should worry all those who fought hard against the Musharraf regime for the revival of a genuine public representative system. The aim of the struggle was not to simply correct the course of democratic procedure: ballot freedom bringing in a leadership that could genuinely claim to represent the people of Pakistan.

The more important and central aim was to allow democracy to change the way this country was governed, to unleash its immense potential for progress, to institutionalise the best democratic practices, and on the side, once and for all shut the mouths that always feed on brassy breasts, crying for the return of martial rule.

While the procedural part of democracy is intact, the substance is evaporating fast. For some odd reason the PPP leadership is bent upon placing petards under their seats that can only hoist them to notoriety. Indeed, if shooting oneself in the foot were a sport, the Winter Olympics would surely have yielded one gold medal for Pakistan this year.

Taking on the judiciary was supposed to be a sensational tactical move — at least this was how its planners explained it to me in background interviews. It was supposed to enliven the PPP worker by exposing him to Nawaz Sharif’s red rag. It was supposed to bifurcate the lawyers and make some members of the higher judiciary come down off their high horse.

But issuing notifications contrary to the chief justice’s advice was always going to be a strategic disaster, dwarfing Kargil’s heights of folly. And that was exactly how it unfolded. In no time the government widened its zone of conflict with the judiciary, which now involved not just its reluctance to implement the Supreme Court’s directives in the NRO case, but also deliberate attempts to stage-manage judges’ affairs.

Leaving aside applause from a minority, almost the entire legal fraternity’s astute minds stood in agreement that the government had overstepped its constitutional limits. Moreover, it was counter-intuitive to think that the judges would be kind to the sleight of the government’s legal hand.

And even if the government believed it had a case to make, it made a hash of it in the court of public opinion because of the unusually poor articulation by its information stalwarts. Confounding the confusion was the prime minister’s back and forth stance. He fumed and sounded threatening on Monday, then roughly around the same time on Tuesday gate-crashed the farewell dinner for Justice (retd) Khalil Ramday, and by Wednesday looked set to backslide on the issue.

If this was meant to be a damage-limitation exercise, it was most inappropriate and also non-purposive. By the time premier Gilani decided to waltz into the judges dinner and announced that there would be good news, the next day the PPP had lost vital moral ground on the score. Unlike misadventures of the past — for instance, last year’s failed political putsch in Punjab — this time around very few were willing to define the notification move as an error of judgement or an innocent mistake.

Even after the government’s remedial measures, the hum of public opinion goes something like this: the PPP government knew what it was doing; it wanted to see the consequences of this move; dominate national debate, sidelining issues like President Zardari’s corruption cases; and that some in its ranks wanted the crisis to boil over into a breakdown of the system so that the party could play the martyr and survive to fight another election.

These are all serious charges and there is little doubt that the government shall counter them with all the vehemence its members can command. That act itself would waste more precious national time and take the government further away from the real responsibility of taking charge of Pakistan.

This is why the three pictures make such a telling comment on where different power centres in this country stand in their preferences and use of their office. It shows what occupies the minds of the three men at work, what keeps them busy in these grim hours of national struggle for survival against terrorism, hunger and poverty. The pictures are a disappointing antithesis of what the struggle against Musharraf was meant to be: the army either on the borders or in the barracks, and the civilians leading the march for development and purposeful democracy.

What we see instead is a throwback to farcical politics and national priorities getting kicked around. Is it any wonder then that the entire development plan for FATA — the test case of the Pakistani state’s ability to show that it can win the final battle against the terrorists — has been planned without much input from the government? Its funding is directly coming to the NWFP governor, a civilian face that keeps democratic appearances from dropping altogether. The implementation body — the local military commander, the committee of elders, the political agent and the donor — is devoid of any thumbprint of the federal government. The president, the sole custodian of FATA under the constitution, is not even present by proxy in this entire scheme of things. Neither is the prime minister. A general breaking ground for development projects in South Waziristan is a worrying contrast to a president and a prime minister either shifting judges around or administring polio drops to perfectly healthy children.

The writer is a leading Pakistani journalist