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Journalism of Courage
Nilofar Bakhtiar, Pakistan8217;s tourism minister, reported back at work after Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz returned her resignation. She had quit after the controversy created over her hugging her parachute instructor in France recently. But Dawn reported on May 24 that Aziz8217;s predecessor, Zafarullah Khan Jamali, is refusing to reconsider his decision to quit the ruling PML. On Tuesday, he handed his letter to President Pervez Musharraf. In the letter addressed to PML President Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, he 8220;showered words of appreciation for General Musharraf and criticised the policies of the party leadership8221;. According to Dawn, 8220;Jamali said that he was concerned over the situation that had arisen because the entire responsibility of the presidential reference against the chief justice had been put on President Musharraf, instead of the government8221;. Jamali was PM from November 2002 to June 2004.
On May 23 Dawn indicated that the Muttahida Qaumi Movement MQM too could quit the ruling coalition. In a report from London, where MQM chief Altaf Hussain is based, said three options would be circulated for consideration by the party8217;s rank and file: to leave the ruling coalition altogether and sit on the opposition benches, withdraw from just the federal cabinet, or withdraw from both the federal and provincial cabinets. The MQM8217;s impatience comes from a sense that its defence had been abandoned by its political allies in the aftermath of the May 12 violence in Karachi.
Again, full circle
So, what lies ahead? On May 24, Ejaz Haider tried to depersonalise the issue in The Daily Times: 8220;Can military intervention be treated as a stand-alone phenomenon, one that can be divorced from other political and societal activity? Or to put it another way: do interventions take place in a vacuum or are they a function of structural problems within a polity?8221; He considered 8220;the cycles of governance which have seen the wheel coming full circle on both types of rule, civil and military, one giving way to the other. Each time we witness the same enthusiasm, the same spirit and same expectations just before the transition to civilian rule: each time also, it does not take long for the dream to sour.8221; Haider8217;s conclusion: 8220;The current struggle is a worthy cause because it has weakened Musharraf; authoritarian rulers are more amenable to negotiating when the chips are down. If he is sensible, he will open up the system. If not, he will try to use coercion. The first could lead to the possibility of another five- to ten-year period in which we could get down to the task of addressing the structural problems of the civil-military cycles; the second to a cure that may prove worse than the disease.8221;
Once, in 1954
Justice Khalilur Rehman Ramday, who heads the Supreme Court bench hearing the suspended chief justice8217;s case, set off lessons in history when he exclaimed during proceedings, 8220;God forbid that the SC decision should meet the fate of the Maulvi Tamizuddin case.8221; The Daily Times explained on Thursday: 8220;In a general sense, the Tamizuddin case was the first instance of an anti-democratic trend in Pakistan.8221; Tamizuddin was the president of the Constituent Assembly when it was dissolved by Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad in 1954. Tamizzudin, who hailed from East Pakistan, had been Mohammed Ali Jinnah8217;s deputy when he himself was president of the assembly. The GG had fired the then prime minister and left for an overseas tour. The assembly then ruled to reduce his power to dismiss governments. Mohammad returned and ordered the dissolution of the assembly. Tamizzudin filed an appeal in the Sindh high court, benefiting from the services of D.N. Pritt, a British barrister who had once defended Jomo Kenyatta. He won the case. But by The Daily Times8217;s account, Tamizuddin had run out of funds by the time his case went to the federal court in appeal. And though Pritt enlisted himself for the cause at a later stage, the court restored the dissolution.
