Courting emergency

The much-flouted independence “given” to the media by the regime also came under attack when TV channels were attacked and taken off the air as punishment for broadcasting live the suspended judge’s road shows and the support he was given by the public at large. BBC Pakistan’s hourly news bulletins on FM radio stations faced similar closures; when the station in question started broadcasting its own news bulletins instead, it was shut down time and again. The Punjab and Sindh governments too have been guilty of directing cable operators to suspend transmission of certain channels arbitrarily, until the channel owners buckled under pressure and fell in line. The May 12 government-orchestrated carnage in Karachi remains fresh in memory.

Let’s not forget that before March 9 this year when the chief justice was suspended, subsequently imprisoned in his house and then manhandled, courts too had acquiesced and kept mum over the government’s highhanded tactics. Since the decision on the chief justice’s restoration on July 20, the apex court has, however, hit back by showing unprecedented inflexibility to ‘accommodate’ the government on any given issue. The reasons cited by government sources for the imposition of emergency rule were the Supreme Court’s refusal to have a “working relationship” with the government — the very suggestion being an oxymoron and equally telling of the “real” democracy fathered by Musharraf.

Thus, the power-sharing deal between Benazir Bhutto and the general may be dead, under tremendous public pressure, before it even began to breathe. But Musharraf must seek re-election as a serving general, or so have the gods decreed; whether that requires suspending basic rights and civic liberties or resorting to realpolitiking is beside the point. Nearly 60 and still crawling is the state that best describes the infantile democracy in Pakistan.

That said, the armed forces have a bigger job to do which they cannot leave half-finished. This pertains to the cleaning up of the jihadi culture plaguing Pakistan like never before. For a country accustomed to long bouts of military rule and self-serving politicians coming to power in between, and that too only with the approval or active backing of the army, it is unnerving to see the urgency being attached by certain quarters to immediate restoration of democracy at this time. Ideally, the military should never have wielded political power, but that ideal has remained elusive in the last six decades of Pakistan’s troubled politics.

At this point in time, internal and external factors have combined to moderate the ruling generals’ behaviour: they have been forced to rid the country of the jihadi elements and shun their own old, hardened attitudes towards India. The American pressure for coming down hard on militants hiding along the Afghan border or to face an invasion to get the needful accomplished is no secret. Neither is the flexibility General Musharraf has time and again showed to bury the hatchet with India. These are two jobs that the army alone should be required to do rather than being offered a cover of a civilian, democratic government behind which it can conveniently hide and go back to forestalling either of the tasks being seen through to a logical conclusion.

In this context, Bhutto’s eagerness to bail out the embattled general and Sharif’s vendetta-laden agenda against him, with the sole objective of somehow coming back in power, do not serve Pakistan’s longer-term interests. If ever a military ruler was needed by the country, it is now. Given the circumstances, and despite reservations as to their own convictions, the generals have little choice but to cleanse the country of the extremists and mend fences with India in a meaningful, lasting way.

If the Supreme Court lets the military leader have his way just this once, it may serve the cause of Pakistan better than the court’s ready acceptance in the past of the infamous “doctrine of necessity” every time a dictator sought legitimacy. Illegal dismissal of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan by Governor-General Ghulam Mohammed was upheld by the apex court in 1954 under the doctrine. Subsequently, usurpation of power by military chiefs, citing national interest, was indemnified in 1958, 1977, and lastly in 2000, when the court gave Musharraf not only the right to put the constitution in abeyance but also to amend it to suit the exigencies of governance under a military umbrella.

Musharraf’s tragedy this time round may be that his case now rests at the footstep of an institution whose head he wished to tame but failed.

The writer is an editor with Dawn, Karachi