Interesting times

Interesting times beget interesting questions. And in his customary front-page editorial for the weekly newspaper, The Friday Times, editor Najam Sethi recaps them.

Interesting times beget interesting questions. And in his customary front-page editorial for the weekly newspaper, The Friday Times, editor Najam Sethi recaps them. 8220;Who killed Bob Woolmer? Why is Pakistani cricket dogged with controversy? Will the CJP Chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry, be 8216;restored8217; by the Supreme Judicial Council under Justice Rana Bhagwandas? How will a 8216;restoration8217; or 8216;sacking8217; of the CJP impact on President General Pervez Musharraf and the judiciary and what will be its consequences for dictatorship and democracy? Will elections be held this year or postponed? Will General Musharraf be both army chief and president next year? Will Benazir Bhutto return to Pakistan and lead her party in the elections?8221;

Those elections are less than a year away. Three weeks after the dismissal, the media in Pakistan remains charged with the spontaneity of protests, and now asks which way they may take the country. 8220;This is a movement different from other movements in our history,8221; claims Ayaz Amir in his weekly column in the daily Dawn. He adds: 8220;Musharraf8217;s hands are tied, but how? Because unless he sweeps everything from the table and imposes emergency or martial law he must abide by the Constitution, moth-eaten and mutilated as it is8230; Musharraf has already done the nation a favour by triggering this judicial crisis which may yet lead, unless misfortune is woven into our destiny, to the triumph of constitutionalism.8221;

Sethi8217;s assessment is more sober: 8220;If the SJC Supreme Judicial Council under Justice Rana Bhagwandas is reconstituted as demanded by the CJP and restores him, the judiciary will have acquitted itself well in the public eye. But this CJP doesn8217;t have much support or sympathy among fellow judges in the Supreme Court. He would be a lame duck captain whose teammates are likely to gang up and thwart him at every stage at the behest of the executive8230; If the CJP is sacked, however, the government and the judiciary will both lose credibility8230; Thus it can be argued that regardless of whether he is sacked or restored, the CJP is already in the throes of becoming history. The political parties sense this and are making adjustments accordingly.8221;

Straws in the wind

Those adjustments may explain why the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy 8212; formed in 1999 with Benazir Bhutto8217;s PPP and Nawaz Sharif8217;s PML 8212; did not brandish much strength on the streets on Monday. Explained the Daily Times: 8220;One major reason: the PPP and the JUI are playing footsie with the government and are in no mood to rock the boat unduly. Nonetheless, the parties came out fairly in the major cities of the country and had a degree of popular sentiment with them. Did they aim at getting the people at large to join them and create the impression of a popular upsurge? One is constrained to say that this was not the objective of the parties8230; Of course, there is no doubt that the PPP dominated in the cities where its support is strong8230; Lahore was for a long time the city of Nawaz Sharif. He was strong on the basis of market committees where his people ruled the roost. The PPP had begun to lose in Lahore regularly and was getting used to being the rural party in Punjab8230; But after 1999, the PML was bisected to form PMLQ and the city shopkeepers and traders moved quietly behind the new Punjabi leadership from Gujrat under current Punjab CM Pervaiz Elahi and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. It is therefore not surprising that the show in Lahore belonged mainly to the PPP after the government had given permission for the rally.8221;

Tank under siege

In a New York Times article widely reprinted in Pakistan, novelist Mohsin Hamid writes as part of a stocktaking of the country during Musharraf8217;s rule: 8220;Pakistan has grown increasingly divided between the relatively urban and prosperous regions that border India and the relatively rural, conservative and violent regions that border Afghanistan.8221; In fact, this week militants mounted another bid for primacy on the town of Tank, near Dera Ismail Khan. The pretext for hostilities was the death of a militant in an aborted attempt on Monday to whisk away students from a private local school. The proto-Taliban militants first kidnapped the principal and his brother and then launched a rocket and mortar attack on the city on Wednesday morning. An eight-hour battle with the security forces ensued, taking at least 26 lives. Curfew is now imposed and on Friday Daily Times reported from official sources: 8220;The government would use a jirga to obtain a pledge from the Taliban that they would not attack Tank city again.8221; Dawn sounded the alarm in an editorial Thursday: 8220;This is not a time for half measures8230; There is a very real fear that if Tank falls to the Taliban, the domino effect could take in its sweep other 8216;settled8217; areas in NWFP.8221;

Capital question

There is a report in Dawn that businesses and markets in Muzaffarabad and Neelum districts were shut on Thursday in protest against reported plans to relocate the capital of 8220;AJK8221;. The government had said last year that state-level offices would be relocated along the Muzaffarabad-Kohala road. The local government, for its part, said that the relocation should be seen as a 8220;humanitarian8221; issue.