Back from the brink

Pakistan has been pulled back from the brink of chaos. With President Farooq Leghari's resignation and the removal of Sajjid Ali Shah, Chie...

Pakistan has been pulled back from the brink of chaos. With President Farooq Leghari’s resignation and the removal of Sajjid Ali Shah, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the constitutional logjam has been broken. No doubt this will be seen as a victory for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who publicly accused both men of conspiring to remove him from office. But triumphalism would be inappropriate in the prime ministerial camp in the light of Sharif’s own contributions to the crisis and how close the ruling Pakistan Muslim League came to plunging the country into worse trouble by taking the law into its own hands.

The whole experience of constitutional brinkmanship should be chastening for all those involved. Two factors appear to be responsible for the way the long stand-off between the court and the prime minister has been resolved:mediation by the Chief of Army Staff, General Jehangir Karamat, and what must be called an act of judicial extremism. It is not known exactly what persuaded Karamat to come down on the side of parliamentary forces or even whether he did.

Like everyone else, the army chief would certainly not have wanted to see the prolongation of a dispute that was tearing the courts apart and paralysing the government. That situation could not but invite military intervention sooner, rather than later. However, even though it has been popular in Pakistan through thick and thin, the army could not hope to retain a high degree of popular esteem if it was seen to act against a government which won the largest popular mandate in Pakistani history only nine months ago.

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As for Shah, it is one thing to try and establish a strong and independent judiciary and quite another to singlemindedly bludgeon the prime minister into submission. His views on recent amendments to the anti-defection, anti-terrorism and corruption laws are debatable. But, at the climax of his quarrel with the prime minister, for him to restore the president’s power to dismiss the prime minister and parliament is nothing short of blatant political partisanship. That act probably tilted the scales against him and precipitated what followed, the unprecedented revocation of the Chief Justice’s order by another bench, presidential assent to a government order replacing the Chief Justice and Leghari’s resignation. Peace and propriety have been restored at very high cost to the institutions of Pakistani democracy.

No Pakistani prime minister has ever been as powerful, in a formal sense, as Nawaz Sharif is today. This presents him with an extraordinary opportunity and extraordinary temptation. He has the chance to address deep-running obstacles in Pakistani society to broadbase economic growth and participatory democracy. He can rule by diktat or by building a political consensus at each step. His critics see an authoritarian streak in his measures to keep his party in line and his attitude towards judicial autonomy. His apologists argue strong tactics are essential to deal with ethnic and sectarian strife and the bureaucratic-industrialist-landlord class whose interests are threatened by new economic policies.

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