Not by the judiciary alone

AFTER having been forced to eat humble pie on the Chief Justice’s reinstatement almost a month ago, the Musharraf regime, amidst growing chaos and confusion, had to retract its decision to impose an emergency in the country. The disarray that characterises the regime’s ranks has achieved comic proportions with cabinet ministers and party officials making statements that contradict each other.

Much as the regime might try to make a virtue of the necessity to beat a hasty retreat after assessing the dangerous consequences of this desperate measure, it is now clear that it lacks the gumption and panache that induced it to undertake the misadventures of the recent past.

A midnight call from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (evocative of the one made by her predecessor Colin Powell made after 9/11) to Gen Musharraf aborted the brazen attempt to launch yet another nightmarish misadventure which would have surely led to a bitter and violent confrontation.

The realisation that it has now reached a cul-de-sac from which it can’t be rescued even by its best friends has created near panic in the regime’s ranks. Given the government’s past propensity to get out of difficult situations by a combination of denial, bluff and brute force, it is still hoping that it would find a way out of the sorry mess it has created for itself.

It has been trying to buy more time and hoping that somehow both its present friends and former foes, whom it has secretly started courting, would acquiesce in participating in elections held under its auspices, without meeting the basic conditions of polls being free and fair.

While the imposition of emergency has, at least for the time being, been exorcised by the enormous and widespread opposition to it through the media’s efforts to thwart attempts to suppress the news, the threat continues.

Although the decision seems to have been made with some trepidation and floated as a trial balloon, the sword of Damocles will continue to hang over politicians and the people. Ironically, it will only embolden the people to come on to the streets, should the regime attempt to cling too dearly on to power.

The spirit of defiance was spearheaded by the Chief Justice for over four months and rekindled by the release on bail of Javed Hashmi, an opposition MNA who bravely faced the ire of this military regime for four long years in prison, along with countless others who are no longer afraid of the military uniform, which Gen Musharraf considers so essential for his and his regime’s survival.

Even though the failed Lal Masjid rebellion was totally misguided, it represented in part the vanishing fear among the people of the coercive force of the military when used against its own people.

With the talk of a deal with Benazir Bhutto having lost its initial disruptive impact on the unity of the opposition forces, partly because of Gen Musharraf’s lack of credibility and partly because Ms Bhutto quickly realised that, after the July 20 judgment, it had become less indispensable to her strategy to regain power — besides sullying her image — the general is hard put to look for other, none-too-obvious options.

The recent storm in the US presidential politics did seem to provide an opportunity to the general to take another U-turn and become an anti-American hero, but unfortunately, that was too risky a gamble for him and his US largesse-addicted army to take. The fates of Ayub Khan, Z.A. Bhutto and Ziaul Haq, who took that kind of risk in stemming the tide of their falling popularity towards the end of their respective regimes, are obviously not lost on him.

Thus, despite some anti-US noises being made by prominent officials, including ministers, another telephone call within 24 hours from Ms Rice persuaded Gen Musharraf to proceed post-haste to attend the joint Pak-Afghan jirga in Kabul, reversing his earlier decision which could have been interpreted as a mild revolt against the anti-Pakistan vibes pervading in Washington.

The general’s only option now is to seek a face-saving exit, although the Chaudhry brothers continue to assure him that his dream of a second term in uniform by election from the current assemblies is no mere fantasy. The regime is also sending veiled signals that the option of imposing an emergency, with a view to delaying the forthcoming elections, is by no means off the table.

The unfolding political scenario is characterised by the lack of clarity and confusion, which is deliberately being created by the Musharraf regime and its supporters as the main stratagem to cling to power and divide the ranks of the opposition. It knows well that once the opposition is able to close its ranks and succeeds in bringing out the masses on the streets, Gen Musharraf will not be able to use force against them.

Corps-10 will become immobilised and no soldier would be willing to shoot people on the streets. With the liberated citadel of justice placed next to the humiliated presidential palace, each of his Machiavellian ploys to remain ensconced in the elaborate safety of the presidential palace and the camp office a few miles away, will be combed — and most likely checkmated — by a reborn judiciary, whose security and independence have been underwritten by the daily demonstrations in its support for more than four months.

But it would be a mistake to pit the judiciary squarely against the executive and to expect it to bear a burden beyond the call of its normal duty on a regular basis. It is important that the weapon of judicial activism, which could be considered a juridical equivalent of a short, task-bound military action and that has enhanced the role of the superior judiciary in recent months, doesn’t get blunted through overuse.

The Supreme Court can’t become, or even be seen to become, a partisan forum — a task much better performed by the political actors. However, as long as the present backlog of constitutional irregularities and administrative misdemeanours are not adjudicated, the Supreme Court will have no option but to devote much of its time to these highly-charged political cases. The onus of corrective action, therefore, lies on non-judicial actors.

The present stand-off between the executive and the judiciary is mainly the fallout of the political stalemate created by the current regime’s reluctance to cede power acquired through unconstitutional means and to extend its rule for another term by holding elections on a playing field slanted in its favour. These were the main motivations behind the reference against the Chief Justice, which has been set aside by the Supreme Court.

The eagerly-awaited full judgment of the court would prove revealing as to what the court feels should be done to solve these issues in the legislative and political arena. In order to avoid lengthy litigation on the controversial issue of the president’s re-election on his terms, it is essential that a process of political engagement is started without further delay. Otherwise, the country is likely to plunge into a deep quagmire of fractious civil strife.

To avert such a scenario, political parties and civil society have their work cut out for themselves. They have to exert maximum pressure on Gen Musharraf and his cabal to stop obstructing the emergence of a new dawn in Pakistan for which the people have waited and suffered for the last six decades. History will not forgive us for losing this unique opportunity to make a new beginning which may not knock on this unfortunate country’s door for a long time to come.

Instead of getting bogged down in narrow considerations of realpolitik and seeking to further their parochial interests, it is time for putting their heads together to evolve a realistic, home-grown agenda for democratic polity and equitable, inclusive and non-elitist development, which only the present regime is disposed against. The time for daring and out-of-the-box solutions is now.

While a detailed spelling out of this is far beyond the space of this column and the capabilities of a single author, the broad contours of such an agenda are beginning to emerge in the wake of the series of follies of the present regime and that have become glaringly obvious since its grip started slipping at the beginning of this year.

The first is that there should be no compromise on the issue of the continuation or re-entry of the military into politics. This aberration in Pakistan’s polity has to be buried once and for all. With the judiciary’s newly-found role in ensuring democratic governance, this is an achievable goal. The new parliament should further strengthen the constitutional cover.

The second related issue highlighted by the muzzling of Ayesha Siddiqa’s book is that the military’s lengthening shadow on the economy needs to be restricted through legislative oversight and judicial review of economic activities. While military personnel should receive proper incentives and rewards for their services, there is a need for ensuring both horizontal (across professional groups) and vertical (within a hierarchical group) equity.

The political parties must also pledge to follow a code of conduct for dealing with their rivals and for giving sufficient room for inner-party democracy. The present feudalistic pattern of political governance has to give way to more democratic structures allowing for the emergence of new leadership and ideas.

There should be a healthy competition among parties for presenting credible manifestos on social, economic, cultural and other public issues, including strategies to deal with social violence and religious extremism. The need to chart a new roadmap for the country’s future is imperative, if we want it to at least celebrate its first centennial with honour and dignity.

Email: smnaseem@gmail.com

National cohesion: the other view

SIXTY years after Independence, some analysts have rightly embarked upon an exercise in soul-searching with regard to the sorry state of the Pakistani federation.

Shahid M. Amin writing in this paper’s July 27 issue (‘For national cohesion’) has initiated the discussion by correctly asserting that “matters will not improve unless, as a people, we do some sober thinking and carry out a reasoned debate about fundamental issues.”

Among the fundamental issues, he offers an explanation of what he calls “the origins, and the question as to why Pakistan came into being and what is the ‘ideology’ of Pakistan.” The essay concludes by briefly offering a solution to the current malaise. It is in the spirit of dialogue that I submit my reservations regarding Mr Amin’s view of the genesis of Pakistan.

The mainstay of the essay is the following statement. “No doubt, the Indian Muslims had a unique identity based on a thousand years of Muslim rule over India, during which they developed a distinct culture and way of life.

This is an immensely problematic assertion with very questionable assumptions. The notion of a Muslim identity “based on a thousand years of Muslim rule” and the idea of India are taken as given and settled issues. Neither of these notions is supported by the historical and political trajectories of the subcontinent. Consider the following three points.

Firstly, the so-called Muslim rule was not a homogenous category. It was rather an endless saga of bloody fights of an inter- and intra-dynastic nature. Successive dynasties ruled portions of modern India more in the name of their respective clans than because of any pan-Islamic identity.

While they shared Islam as their faith, this was neither the reason nor the rationale for their stay in power. It would, therefore, be a historical fantasy to assume that dynastic rules could have provided a “unique identity” to diverse groups of people who came to embrace Islam as their faith in the Indian subcontinent.

Secondly, belief in the fantastical category of Muslim rule leads Mr Amin to argue that Muslims in India developed “a distinct culture and way of life.” Explaining the ingredients and history of such a culture and life are certainly beyond the scope of a single newspaper article, but there is plenty by way of counter-evidence to take the claim of “a distinct culture” with a pinch of salt.

Let’s take the example of the Muslims of Punjab and the Mappilas of the present-day Indian province of Kerala. How much did these people share beyond their faith? They spoke different languages, had different attires and cuisines and separate repositories of folklore and literature to constitute their identities.

That was, and is, largely true of an array of Muslim communities that have lived in different corners of the subcontinent. It would be erroneous to deny that they share a common religion, but to elevate that shared feature as the base of constituting a distinct identity would be to defy the heterogeneous societal reality of Indian Muslims.

Thirdly, the notion that there was an India as it territorially exists today during the thousand-year long Muslim dynastic rule is more of a myth than a reality. Modern India is at best a British creation and that only in an administrative sense. Even at the time of Independence, one-third of what are now India and Pakistan was run through assorted arrangements with more than 550 princely states.

We don’t need to dig too deep into the archives to see the recent origins of the idea of India. (All we need to do is read Sunil Khilnani’s ‘The idea of India’ and Ramchandra Guha’s ‘India after Gandhi’). These can be seen in the concerted and at times contradictory efforts of 20th century Indian nationalists who tried to make political claims over the territory administered by the British in the name of the nation.

The political project of constructing a sense of modern India, and by implication of an Indian, remained contested and one such controversy at a crucial time in the subcontinent’s history led to Partition in 1947.

However, this does not imply, as Mr Amin maintains, that “they (Muslims) were convinced that Muslims constituted a nation in India.” This idea is unlikely to withstand the historical scrutiny and the nuanced nature of the Muslim elite’s relationship with Indian nationalism. Their Muslim identity is best captured by a conversation between the Raja of Mahmudabad and M. A. Jinnah.

Recalling a conversation that took place between the Raja and Jinnah in 1925 or 1926 this is what the former has to say. Jinnah asked him, “What are you, a Muslim first or and Indian first?” The Raja of Mahmudabad replied “I am a Muslim first and then an Indian.” To this Jinnah said, “My boy, no, you are an Indian first and then a Muslim.”

Such were the dictates of history that within two decades of the above conversation Mr Jinnah was heading the state that came into being partly as a result of the Indian National Congress’s obduracy of almost blanket rejection of the All-India Muslim League’s demands to keep the country together in the wake of an imminent British withdrawal.

I fully concur with Mr Amin’s observation that the demand for a separate homeland comprising regions where Muslims were in a majority had nothing to do with establishing a theocratic state. But the eventual support in regions that came to comprise Pakistan did not emanate from, as he claims, their keenness to “protect the Urdu language. It was not only seen as the lingua franca of the Muslim population of the whole of India, but also represented the best in Muslim cultural and literary traditions.”

The same old mantra of equating Urdu with Muslim nationalism that has proved to be so divisive in Pakistan is rehearsed here again. Urdu at best was the lingua franca of the Muslim elites of certain regions, rather than of the “Muslim population” scattered all over the Indian subcontinent.

The Sindhi Muslims in the 20th century showed no signs of foregoing the option of Sindhi in favour of Urdu. The case of the Bengali Muslims, who were the majority linguistic community of united Pakistan, was not much different either.

As early as 1948 while Jinnah was alive, Bengali politicians had expressed their serious concerns about introducing Urdu as the state language of the new country. Jinnah did not win many Bengali hearts during his trip to Dhaka in March 1948 when said “that the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language.”

Because of the questionable premises regarding Pakistan’s past, the author arrives at a rather simplistic solution for the future of the country: “To survive in the present-day world and to make progress, Pakistan must promote modern education and acquire technology.” Fair enough. But neither modern education nor technology are the answers to key questions regarding the political configurations of the country. For that, we will have to turn to the spirit of the 1940 Lahore Resolution which envisages the country as a vibrant federation.

Pakistan was not supposed to be a theocratic state, but neither was it supposed to be an over-centralised state run mainly by the armed forces. The idea was that Muslim majority regions would willingly join hands to constitute a loose federation. Pakistan has veered quite far from that founding idea.

Along with education and technology, what Pakistan needs the most today is a political contract that would be perceived as fair, democratic and federal by its people.

The writer teaches at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
hnizamani@hotmail.com

Ineffectual, not tough

THE proposal, flagged up by US State Department officials on Wednesday, to put Iran’s revolutionary guard on a list of foreign terrorist organisations which includes Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas is a confrontational one which could go down well in Washington. There is a temporary confluence of interests between the hawks and doves within the Bush administration, in their conflicted debate on Iran.

The doves –– secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and defence secretary Robert Gates –– favour muscular sanctions but oppose a military strike, while the hawks, led by vice-president Dick Cheney, are convinced that only military action will end Tehran’s nuclear dreams.

Both sides could use this proposal to advance their cause. It allows the doves to argue that more robust sanctions will lessen the need for military action, while the hawks can view this as a useful precursor to a strike by stylising the revolutionary guard as a combatant in the “war on terror”. There have even been rumours of a US airstrike on bases used by the Quds wing of the guard, accused of providing explosives to Shia militias.

But where is the logic of this measure if the policy is to persuade Tehran to stop enriching uranium? Iran will only negotiate away its enrichment programme if it is convinced that Washington is not seeking regime change. The revolutionary guard differs from Al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah in one important respect: it forms the largest part of Iran’s military.

If the US declares an arm of the Iranian state a terrorist organisation (and under the Bush doctrine, those who harbour terrorists are as guilty of terrorism as the terrorists themselves) what chance does Washington have of prising influential Iranian opinion away from the belief that the bomb is the best insurance policy against outside attack?

— The Guardian, London