| February 17, 2002 | Sunday | Zilhaj 4, 1422 |
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Conduct unbecoming
Collective punishment?
ONCE again, Pakistan is facing a familiar situation: an army chief, who seized power and made himself president, now wants his tenure to be regularized and extended beyond the cut-off point for military rule. Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq handled the situation “successfully”. Ayub first won a vote of confidence from the Basic Democrats; next, he had the good sense to discard his uniform, join a political party and contest a presidential election, which, of course, he won. Zia never shed his uniform. Despite repeated assurances to the people that he would not hold a referendum, he held a bogus one to “legitimize” his rule. The people were asked to say “yes” or “no” not to his personality but to his government’s Islamization policy. If they voted “yes”, he would stand elected for five years. President Musharraf now faces the same dilemma.
At his press talk on Thursday, the general repeated that he intended to stay on as president. Previously, he wished to be at the helm to protect the political and economic reforms he had initiated. This time, he said, he wanted democracy to be “sustained”, and that, if he quit, things would “slide back”. How he intends to extend his stay at the top he did not elaborate. The only specific points he mentioned were that he did not intend to form a party of his own nor would he seek election. Then how does he propose to stay on as president except by means of election as provided for in the Constitution?
With the general election scheduled for later this year, six elected houses will be in place in late October. According to the Constitution, it is these bodies that form the electoral college to choose the head of state. President Musharraf has no other choice but to follow this course. There will obviously be other candidates, whom he will have to defeat to win the office of the head of state. He will also have to choose between being president and the chief of the army staff, because the Constitution does not allow a serving general to be president. Ziaul Haq donned both the hats by manipulating the Constitution; does General Musharraf, too, intend to follow in Zia’s footsteps?
The Chief Executive also said he was thinking of limiting the National Assembly’s term to four years. This may be a good idea from the political and practical points of an evolving democracy, but the point to stress is that a military government is not the one to decree it by means of an ordinance. A change in the assembly’s term would require an amendment to the Constitution. This means the move must wait till October, for it is the elected government which will have the moral and legal right to initiate this change through the process laid down in the Constitution. Any other method would be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution, even if the Supreme Court’s judgment of May 2000 allows this government limited right to amend the Constitution.
Constitutional deviations have done enormous harm to Pakistan. Changes made in the basic law to suit the expedient needs of a given party or individual have mauled the Constitution. Some of the most undesirable amendments made by Ziaul Haq are still with us. They have served not to strengthen the country or consolidate the democratic process; they have, instead, disfigured the concept of rule of law. More regretfully, they enabled some autocratic holders of presidential office to dissolve elected parliaments and dismiss governments out of animus or according to their whims and caprices. If President Musharraf really wants to give this country a stable democratic system, he will have to make a clean departure from the past practices. Constitutions and democracy cannot be strengthened by unconstitutional and undemocratic means.
FORMER Interior Minister Chaudhry Shujaat’s showdown with members of the Public Accounts Committee was a disgraceful incident that reflects very poorly on the behaviour of a senior politician aspiring for high elective office. Accompanied by his guards and a group of reporters and photographers, the former minister and senior leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam) made an unauthorized entry into the parliament building on Friday and barged into a meeting of the PAC. An incensed Shujaat went on to harangue the assembled members, claiming that he had been falsely accused by the PAC of misusing an official vehicle and telephone while in office and demanding an unconditional apology. The auditor-general had earlier submitted a report to the PAC asking the authorities to recover money from the former minister for misuse of official facilities. The PAC, which was debating other matters at the time, was forced to halt its proceedings and listen to Mr Shujaat’s bitter diatribe for 40 long minutes. He targeted the chairman of the committee in particular, accusing him of singling out politicians for censure and turning a blind eye to the alleged misdeeds of the bureaucracy and the military.
By any standards, this was deplorable conduct. It would have been far more prudent for Shujaat to challenge the charges at a later stage by going to the court or during a future review of the case. Although not quite of the same scale of ignominy as the storming of the Supreme Court building in 1998 by his erstwhile party, the recent incident represents a similar unsavoury mindset that considers its actions as being above the law. Sadly, it is precisely this kind of high-handed behaviour that brings a bad name to politicians, who are, after all, meant to be our rulers in waiting. It also allows apologists for military rule to unfairly tar all politicians with the same brush and label them as unfit to govern. The irony is that Shujaat is a stalwart of the breakaway anti-Nawaz Sharif faction of the Muslim League, a group that is widely believed to enjoy a generous degree of official patronage. Ignoring such a serious matter can only open the government to charges of considering certain politicians as more equal than others.
IN a bizarre episode the other day, the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation cut off power supply to an entire sector in New Karachi, affecting some 1,500 households. The ‘collective punishment’ was clamped on an entire community because of a few defaulters residing in its midst — those with unpaid utility bills in excess of Rs 10,000 — and, because a handful of miscreants insulted the visiting army monitoring team when it came to recover the dues. Such an arbitrary action by a major civic agency is not only a case of overstepping its legal authority but also smacks of the anti-people approach of the utility’s administration. A more appropriate action would have been to cut off power connections of the individual defaulters in question.
Thus switching off power supply to an entire locality cannot be justified under any pretext whatsoever. The incident calls for an investigation by the local town and city Nazims, the Sindh governor, and the corps headquarters. The latter, because residents of New Karachi’s sector 5-C allege that the power supply was cut off under pressure from the army monitoring team, which demanded that those who insulted the men in khaki be handed over before power can be restored.