RELIGIOUS fanatics have no monopoly of extremism. If we look around, we are sure to meet other varieties. Their ranks include even some of those who are out preaching “enlightened moderation.” Extremism is not quite the same as intemperance but they may be regarded as cousins. Intemperance and excess are identical twins.

Passion, even when it is not associated with faith, will also find extremist expressions. President Ronald Reagan’s hatred of communist insurgents in Nicaragua led him to believe that “extremism in defence of liberty” is a great idea. One who has a passion for alcoholic beverages will not be temperate when he has free access to them.

Love that young people feel for each other, faith that admits of no qualification, concepts of honour, belief in the goodness of certain customs may lead to intemperate conduct.

It may be said that we as a people are given to excess. Attention to measure, proportion and balance does not normally form part of our inclination. Prompted by a preference for certitude, we like to be emphatic, categorical.

Outraged by some blatant wrong done by the government of the day, or a third party such as a foreign power, protesters on the street will turn violent and wreak their anger not only on government establishments and agents but on private cars, buses, homes, and stores. Call it extremist, if you will, but it is undoubtedly intemperate conduct.

How are moderates to deal with extremists? One way may be to leave them alone. An orthodox Jew who stays home, does not work, does not even answer his door bell or pick up his phone on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath) poses no threat to the freedom and tranquillity of his neighbours. That is, if he is willing to be left alone.

But he becomes a menace to their peace if he attempts to force them to do as he does. In that event he will have to be resisted and his force met with force, theirs or that of a public agency.

What if the ruling authority itself is the source of extremist or intemperate conduct? The Saudi policeman who pushes a man on the street into a mosque, because it is prayer time, is acting like a blind fanatic. It is, however, not he but the government he obeys that is the extremist, especially if its regulation in this regard does not have its people’s approval.

The MMA government in our own NWFP wants to follow the Saudi practice, but its enabling legislation, the Hasba bill, does not seem to have general approval, and its enforcement would then be an extremist imposition.

Pliable public officials, more “royalist than the king himself,” are prone to excess in doing their political superior’s bidding. They are, at times, asked to put away some of the regime’s more boisterous opponents. It is not their custom to say that it cannot be done because the targeted person has done nothing unlawful.

They will go to his house, knock on his door, more likely break it down, in the dark of night, wake him up, insult and push around his protesting wife and children, drag him out, shove him into a waiting vehicle, take him away, and confine him in undisclosed quarters. Lately it has become customary for them to suggest that the man may simply have chosen to “disappear” for reasons of his own, and that they have had nothing to do with the matter.

In other cases the police are intemperate because they do not know better. A crime has been committed, they bring in a suspect, picked up on the basis of their own speculation or that of the victim. When their interrogation goes nowhere, they torture him to extract a confession or information. In many instances he dies under torture.

An election is approaching, and the ruling party sends word out to civil and police officials that its candidates must be “enabled” to win. If they won with a margin of a few hundred votes, their victory might appear genuine. It would be seen as fraudulent if they had been “enabled” to win with a huge majority, which would be the case if the riggers had taken the easier option of stuffing the ballot boxes with bogus votes or misreporting the count.

The entire election would then be regarded as dishonest. The officials who rigged it went to excess in carrying out the government’s wishes and, unwittingly, pulled it down in public esteem.

Of essentially the same order is the conduct of the police officers who beat up lawyers and journalists, protesting the suspension of the chief justice of Pakistan, and who forced their way into the offices of a private TV channel, broke up windows and furniture, and manhandled the staff. They acted in this fashion because the TV channel in question had been broadcasting news and pictures that put the present government in a bad light.

That the police action in this case had been excessive and intemperate is evident from the fact that even General Musharraf and his ministers have seen fit to denounce it.

This is pretty much the way our police and security forces act when they feel they have to deal with an agitated crowd. It is not clear why they must confront the crowd at all, especially when it consists of highly educated and normally civil persons such as lawyers and journalists. Their march will probably be much less newsworthy if they are left alone than when they are baton-charged, tear-gassed, and arrested.

Let us now turn to the event that the lawyers and journalists were protesting. According to published accounts, General Musharraf “summoned” Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, the chief justice of Pakistan, to his office in the Army House in Rawalpindi on March 9. The judge could have declined the summons, but since he accepts the general as the president of Pakistan, and since in that role the latter symbolises the country’s sovereignty and majesty, he did answer the call.

The general, in uniform decorated with stars and ribbons, confronted him with allegations of misconduct and, reportedly, called for his resignation. The chief justice denied the allegations and refused to resign, whereupon he was made “non-functional,” detained in the Army House for several hours, during which time the Supreme Judicial Council (two of whose members had been flown to Islamabad from Lahore and Karachi earlier in the day) was called to meet and given a presidential “reference” (bill of accusations) against the chief justice.

In the absence on leave of Justice Bhagwandas, the second most senior member of the Supreme Court, Justice Javed Iqbal was appointed the acting chief justice.

The chief justice was let go towards the evening, but stopped from returning to his office, driven forcibly to his house, and placed under detention there. A large number of police and security personnel surrounded his house and blocked the adjoining streets. He was not allowed to receive visitors or step outside. On March 12, as he proceeded to appear before the Supreme Judicial Council, policemen forced him into one of their vehicles and, in the process, pushed and shoved him and tore his clothes. He arrived at the Supreme Court, where the Council was to meet, dishevelled and distraught.

All of this was needless. General Musharraf could have forwarded the “reference” he is said to have received from the law ministry to the Supreme Judicial Council. One can be sure that the chief justice would have excused himself from participation in its deliberations while it dealt with this reference, because of the obvious conflict of interests.

The Council would then have proceeded under the chairmanship of Justice Bhagwandas after his return from leave. Nothing would have been lost if these proceedings had been deferred for a couple of weeks.

The government’s handling of this case has invited virtually universal condemnation. One may wonder why it chose to act in this manner. It may have been plain thoughtlessness.

Another explanation may be that this is the way military officers act in their own domain, and since they don’t know any other, this is how they act even when they have taken over the government. This explanation is not altogether convincing. I cannot believe men in uniform are incapable of restraint that considerations of balance and proportion may counsel.There is more to this matter than the inclination of an authoritarian ruler to brush aside the niceties of the due process of law, both substantive and procedural. Invested with a monarchical temper and style, he prefers spontaneity to extended deliberation.

Not only does he think highly of himself, cronies and flatterers convince him that he is indeed the master of all he surveys, that he is right in whatever the spirit moves him to do, and that he can get away with it.

This self-perception works to the nation’s detriment in other areas as well. In our own present situation we see that General Musharraf has taken charge of affairs that the Constitution assigns to other functionaries. He has also chosen to be a practising politician. He goes around addressing public meetings and asking his audiences to vote for PML-Q candidates in the next election, because they support him and the good work he is doing. He has been persuaded to believe that the good people of Pakistan love and admire him.

He has apparently not been told that the police in the districts of Gujranwala, Gujrat, Sialkot, and Narowal impounded hundreds of privately owned buses, trucks, and vans to haul persons to his meeting place to provide an “impressive” audience for his speech on March 14. Little does he know that but for the exertions of these officials in his behalf, exertions that amounted to “misconduct and misuse of authority” on their part, he might not have had any audience to speak of.

The writer is a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics for the spring semester.

anwarhs@lahoreschool.edu.pk

FOR more than two weeks now the country has been steeped in chaos and melancholy. Predictions for the days ahead are getting grimmer. The conflict between the executive and judicial organs of the state is seemingly headed towards a long wrangle in the courts and violent protests on the streets.

The thrashing that our cricketers, once world champions, received at the hands of the Irish kids has added grief to the prevailing political tension where people are looking for a glimmer of light. The intelligentsia at home and the world at large may find it hard to believe but to the man in the street the defeat at Kingston has been a greater calamity than the suspension of the chief justice. Our people have learnt to live with injustice but not with insult.

When things go wrong, terribly wrong as indeed they have in Islamabad and Kingston, some heads must roll straightway to assuage the public anger even before blame is apportioned, just as in a decent, democratic society the railway minister resigns, or at least offers to do so, when there is a train accident. The rationale is that if the man in charge gets bouquets when the going is good he must face brickbats when it is not. Pakistani ministers and officials, however, generally refuse to subscribe to this well-established principle of public accountability.

Nevertheless, the chairman of the cricket board, a physician who came from America to develop our human resources but went on to boss the cricketers has tendered his resignation, albeit reluctantly, hoping that being a favourite of the chief patron he would be persuaded to stay on. The selectors, too, have followed suit.

No minister or adviser, however, has resigned on the shoddy handling of the reference against the chief justice though the pain and problem it has caused will have much wider and longer lasting repercussions. Mr Wasi Zafar, the law minister, should have been fired for his obscene innuendos if not for his bad advice.

Interior minister Aftab Sherpao should have resigned to show his remorse over police vandalism at Geo TV where the information minister was a helpless witness and even President Musharraf was compelled to apologise publicly — perhaps for the first time in his seven and a half years in power.

President Musharraf insists that if Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry was harassed or insulted it was because of the flaws and negligence at, what he calls, “the tactical level”. The men in charge at that level were Mr Sherpao and Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi.

Surely, the reference against the chief justice wouldn’t have provoked the lawyers to stage the kind of protest they did if he were not confined to his house, held incommunicado and not hustled on the way to the Supreme Court to appear before the Supreme Judicial Council. Or if the police had not trespassed their limits on the premises of the Lahore High Court. Strangely enough, even the thought of owning up and quitting doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds.Every disaster points to a lesson to prevent its recurrence.

If Musharraf has come to believe that the cricket board should be headed not by a crony but by a former cricketer who is also respected for his leadership, there would be some amends made for the humiliation suffered. Imran Khan eminently fits the bill. He, too, should welcome such a position for in politics he has been alternately cavorting with the clerics or flirting with the liberals — but is still ploughing his lonely furrow. It took Mr Nasim Ashraf less than six months to undo whatever little his predecessor Shaharyar Khan was able to do in three years.

The best for cricket, however, would be if all the surviving test cricketers were to form an electoral college for electing a chairman of the board and thus save the game from cronyism for all times. Abroad Pakistan is now known only for its cricket and extremists. Another Kingston-like debacle and extremism may become our only identification. At home, the street cricketers from among whom arose players like Javed Miandad have vanished as if in protest or in mourning.

In filing charges against the chief justice the essential requirement was objectivity at the policy level and professional competence in handling the adverse fallout. These qualities were in short supply at both levels. While the legality and propriety of the president’s action on the advice of the prime minister (more precisely the law minister and the constitutional adviser) now have to be determined by the council, administrative incompetence in dealing with the public reaction is patently obvious and was there for all to see on the TV screen.

Going by standards witnessed in the past, the current agitation is small and mild, in fact only a little more than a fracas. The agitators in Islamabad or Lahore carried or used no arms and only hurled stones to fight tear-gas shells and police batons. But everywhere and all along it remained a confrontation between two adversaries — the police on one side and the lawyers on the other — with no one around to intervene and cool passions.

That used to be the role of the magistrates who, during disturbances, accompanied every police contingent while the district magistrate and the superintendent of police together coordinated the operation, striking a balance between the use of force and conciliatory measures.

In Lahore when the policemen barged into the high court compound chasing, as it was later explained, the stone-pelting lawyers or when a sub-inspector with some constables attacked the Geo offices in Islamabad, there was no magistrate around to stop or reprimand them or to counsel restraint.

As it happened the police paid no heed even to a screaming information minister for he had no place in the scheme of law enforcement. An hour or so later when the district magistrate (Islamabad federal territory still has one though in the provinces the district magistrate, with all the magistrates subordinate to him, has long ceased to exist) rang up the ravaged studios, compere Kamran Khan described him as an “ahalkar” (errand boy) of the Islamabad administration.

The maintenance of law and order under Musharraf’s reforms is now the responsibility of the nazim. But on the ground it is of the police alone — be it Lahore or Dera Bugti or Kohlu. The nazim was to be seen nowhere in Lahore as he wasn’t ever in Dera Bugti.

The lone district magistrate in Islamabad and the political agents in the tribal territory have become objects of ridicule for there is no organised cadre to back them.

Devolution means the transfer or delegation of power to a lower level especially from the central to regional or local authority. Devolution in another sense also means degeneration to a worse state. When it comes to law and order or fighting crime, Musharraf’s devolution has made matters worse.

In the year ahead — before, during and after the general elections — the district administration everywhere is bound to be called upon to face bigger challenges to law and order than is posed by the current agitation.

The district governments may be able to implement “mega projects” (as long as money keeps coming from the centre) but are not at all capable of maintaining law and order.

Making the field administration effective, professional and neutral should, therefore, be the first task of the Commission on Government Reforms which seems to be proceeding at a leisurely pace.

There is not much time left and the law and order situation will only worsen if elections are postponed.