THE recent parting of ways between the PML-N and the PPP-led coalition after a brief honeymoon has pushed the nerve-wracking uncertainty in the country a notch up. It has also exposed the immaturity of the two leading political parties and will cause a setback to the growth of political parties which are an essential element in a democracy.

The frequent intervention of the military in the political process and the absence of a democratic culture in society have undermined the political system in Pakistan.

The immature manner in which both leading political parties have handled and squabbled over the issue of the restoration of the judges is a perfect example of their disorganised and ad hoc approach to politics.

Take the PML-N first. It has been supporting the cause of the restoration of the judges unequivocally. Taking its cue from the lawyers, it has been insisting that the judges can be restored through a simple resolution followed by an executive order. This indeed is an ideal position which no democrat would dispute. But unfortunately, there is always a difference between what is and what ought to be.

Both the PML-N and PPP had about 150 days since the fateful date of Nov 3 until the time they formed a legal aid committee to prepare a working paper on this issue. Any organised party with an understanding of how analysis is done and various scenarios are developed by social scientists would have commissioned a team of experts to prepare a background paper for them as soon as the issue came into the open. But it is shocking that such an exercise was not done by them until they came face to face with the 30-day deadline.

The PML-N was fooled by the over-simplification of the issue by the leaders of the legal fraternity. Lawyers are trained to see an issue within the framework of existing laws. Moreover, good tactics demanded that they adopt a maximalist position undermining ground political realities.

The PML-N has put itself in a fix by taking a stand, which though principled, is beyond reach. It ignored the existing political realities. A good political party always mulls over all factors and then formulates a stand that is realistic and flexible. Sensible leaders do not bind themselves in chains of their own rhetoric.

Had the PML-N factored in that President Musharraf, who is responsible for this mess, is going to be around for some time and will be backed by his friend President Bush and the Pakistan Army, it wouldn’t have adopted such an extreme and idealistic position. At the same time, the sitting ‘Supreme Court’ cannot be wished away. The question the PML-N should be asking is: has there been a judicial vacuum in the country since Nov 3? The answer would be a big ‘NO’!

It is easy to say that we do not accept the new-PCO judges, but the fact remains that they are there and are giving judgments every day. Most lawyers are also appearing before them. This brings us to the issue of the status of the judgments given in this interim period by the new-PCO judges.

Mind you, this includes crucial cases in which the president’s election and the NRO were challenged. Neither the president nor the PPP would like to re-open these settled cases. If these judgments were valid then how would the judges who handed them down be treated? And, above all, will they just bow out when the restored judges walk in with their supporting lawyers? Short of a revolution, this is not possible because the new PCO judges are backed by the authority of the president.

If all the judges are retained as desired by the PPP and by their benefactor the president, then the issue is how to settle the seniority of these judges. All such issues complicate the solution of this conundrum. Some leading lawyers accept these complications privately and are of the view that there is a solution to all these problems. The PPP is of the opinion that the solution must be such that it will reduce conflict and not add to the present political problems.

The basic flaw in the PPP’s approach is that it wants to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. It wants to keep the alliance with the PML-N which is single-mindedly playing to oust the president. Hence its support for the reinstatement of the chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, has more to it than just principles. At the same time, the PPP wants to keep the commitment given to President Musharraf and the guarantors of the deal Benazir Bhutto entered into. Sooner or later, Mr Zardari will have to realise that the elasticity of Ms Bhutto’s ‘reconciliation policy’ cannot be stretched too far. On the judges’ issue, the PPP cannot interminably seek advice from the president’s men — Hafeez Pirzada and Malik Qayyum.

The PPP’s attempt to salvage the president’s unconstitutional action and meet the popular public demand without even bruising Musharraf is unrealistic. The judges who took the right stand cannot be punished. They have suffered without salaries for the last six months. They should be given the honourable option of returning to their position and the new-PCO judges should be adjusted not at the cost of the judges who took a principled stand.

It is agreed that an objective situation demands some face-saving for the president, but he should not be accommodated all the way. President Musharraf should be the one to eat humble pie, not the judges. It is not a matter of a few jobs. It is the question of establishing the independence of the judiciary in the country, which is a must for democracy.

ayazbabar@gmail.com

EVERY day that passes by without any tangible progress on the restoration of the judges, something sinister happens: the people lose, the dictator wins.

Of course, things are not as black and white as that. We are still in transit to constitutional democracy, a gray zone of sorts where the forces of authoritarianism and democracy fight it out. Who wins depends critically on the legitimacy of and balance of power between the two sides. But none of this political uncertainty should blind us to an atrocious fact: it has been 196 days (and counting) since the then army chief General Pervez Musharraf suspended the Constitution, and illegally deposed and confined some 60 judges of the Supreme Court and the high courts who refused to take oath under his PCO of Nov 3, 2007.

While then prime minister-elect Yusuf Raza Gilani wasted no time in ordering their release from house arrest in March, these judges are still paying the price for their commitment to upholding the constitution. How much longer will they have to face the indignity of their unlawful ouster? How can anyone duly compensate them for their suffering and sacrifice and that of their families?

There are no satisfying answers to these questions, not even from a government elected with the mandate to rid Pakistan of a loathed military dictator and restore the honourable judges. Instead, there is evasion and prevarication. Two self-imposed deadlines have come and gone. In the meantime, the judges who took oath under the PCO are still in office. And so is the man responsible for it all.

These are not exactly signs that democracy is triumphing over dictatorship. The installation of democracy is supposed to signify the political and ideological defeat of authoritarianism. It is supposed to strip the authoritarian ruler of the ability to manipulate political outcomes. Dialogue and consensus are supposed to replace coercion and co-option as the normal means of doing politics. But consensus on the critical judges’ issue remains elusive. And no matter how hard the PPP tries to sell its vague commitment to an independent judiciary, the perception that the party is taking the electorate for a ride is only growing stronger.

The party’s equivocation on the issue has also created a painful dilemma for everyone with a stake in the political process: how to support the restoration of the judiciary without attacking the newly elected government. But duly question we must. If Musharraf could illegally sack the judges, the elected government could have used its legitimate executive authority to restore them. Why has it used this or that pretext to delay the restoration of the judiciary even after five former Supreme Court chief justices and 16 other judges publicly opined that a simple resolution in the National Assembly would be more than sufficient backing for the executive to achieve that goal?

The socialised political scientist in me has an instinctive response: politics thy name is expediency. Politicians want to capture public office and stay there. Nothing else matters to them. In fact, they might even be using the judges’ issue for their political ends. So why should we expect them to behave otherwise? Simply because we rightly expect both the PPP and PML-N to have understood that their past intolerance for each other allowed the military to divide and rule.

This is not to belittle their struggle against authoritarianism. Nor to sully their efforts to sustain (so far) a moderate centre committed to democracy and civilian supremacy over the military. This is just to remind them that their power and legitimacy derives from the electoral process through which the people have delegated them the right to govern. By publicly and voluntarily committing to a deadline for the restoration of the illegally removed judges, they are thus morally and politically obligated to use these delegated powers to act on their words.

They have not yet lived up to their side of that democratic contract. Nobody is really buying the oft-repeated line that their disagreement is merely procedural. To the contrary, it appears fundamental. Take the PML-N’s position. Whether or not Nawaz Sharif is solely interested in restoring the chief justice to get rid of Musharraf, the party has staked its credibility on the restoration of the judiciary and it remains averse to the PCO judges. The party leadership had reportedly accepted the ‘ad hoc’ option for those judges on the condition that the PPP stick to the May 12 deadline. But that didn’t happen and the party managed to save face by leaving the federal cabinet. It remains to be seen how far it is willing to go.

The PPP is now free of the deadline curse to work out a viable solution. But the party has stuck to its untenable position that restoring the judges is just one part of a comprehensive judicial reform package. What that package contains is not entirely clear. Media reports indicate that the party-government is furtively toying with several constitutional amendments, including the creation of a separate constitutional court, designed to neutralise a restored chief justice Iftkihar Chaudhry. With the Bush administration firmly behind Musharraf, the PPP is playing it safe while the top party leadership clears itself of corruption and other cases, many of them politically motivated, under the NRO.

Can the party get away with not restoring the judiciary in letter and spirit? It will depend in good measure on public pressure and opposition in the days to come. The lawyers and other civil society groups may or may not be able to up the ante against a democratically elected government. But there is little doubt that the present course is likely to cost the PPP quite a bit more of its credibility. Given its anti-establishment past, the party leadership should know that better than anyone.

The trade-off between democracy and the judiciary is a false one. One cannot exist for long without the other. The real choice is between the rule of law and rule against the law. As long as Musharraf sits atop the presidency, the rule of law stands no chance.

The writer, a PhD candidate in political science, is conducting doctoral research in Pakistan.

as2552@columbia.edu

AS night fell on Bogalay, so too did the rain. The tiny proportion of residents whose homes had survived the cyclone retreated indoors, often with their less fortunate neighbours.

Others bedded down in monasteries and schools that had been turned into refugee centres. Far more crawled under the makeshift shelters they had cobbled together from bits of corrugated iron and branches they had found in the rubble. A few resigned themselves to another night outdoors.

The nights are long in Burma. It is pitch black by 7pm, and the sun doesn’t rise until after 5am. With no food and no light there is nothing to do but listen to the relentless patter of the rain and the groans of the water buffalo, the monotony broken only by the whimpering howls of stray dogs slowly starving to death. Only in the bigger affected townships, such as Pyapon and Kungyangong, do any buildings have electricity.

In one shack just before the bridge leading to Bogalay, where the UN estimates almost half a million people were affected by the cyclone, one young woman groaned as she eased herself on to the improvised wooden floor she and her husband had built from the scraps of what was left of their old house. She clutched her chest and her hip.

When the roof blew off her bamboo home, ripping away the walls from around her, she was hit by her own belongings as they were catapulted towards her at 130mph.

It had just gone half past seven and her candle was already almost burnt out. Her husband had a motorbike but with no jobs, no money and the price of petrol having doubled in a fortnight, they were going nowhere.

Yet they were two of the lucky ones. At least 10,000 people from her town have been confirmed as dead. The bodies of many of them were still floating in the river in the centre nearly two weeks after the cyclone hit. Earlier, a Burmese man with a digital camera showed pictures of pale, bloated, naked corpses in the river. “I counted 400 bodies,” he said. Some were bobbing in the water, others had snagged on tree branches or caught in the reeds. If this was the situation in a town easily accessible by road and river, it appeared to offer little hope for the million or more stuck in remote areas still to be reached by aid workers.

Some people from unaffected areas of Burma, knowing perhaps that their government could not be trusted to help, had taken matters into their own hands, and simply stocked their own vehicles with whatever bits they could afford, and dished them out to their fellow citizens. Outside the township of Kawshum, locals lined the streets waiting for aid.

Candles, bars of soap and sachets of washing powder were thrown from one rickety bus. Further in, on a bumpy road outside the beach town of Kungyangon, clean clothes were being thrown at survivors. It was a welcome offering. Asked who had brought these supplies they simply replied: “Ordinary people.” The Burmese army was everywhere, watching, standing, but not helping. The legendarily xenophobic and suspicious Burmese government is determined that no foreigners be allowed to visit the worst affected areas. They are furious that some outsiders got through in the week after the disaster, some with cameras and even satellite broadcasting equipment, and will not allow that to happen again. Huge numbers of soldiers, policemen and immigration officers have been deployed to numerous checkpoints.

It is all part of the country’s mission statement, what the Junta calls “The People’s Desire”. This — as the state-owned newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, reminds its readers every day — is “to oppose foreign nationals interfering in internal affairs of the state”. These interfering foreigners include ex-pat non-governmental organisation workers and UN officials.

The eight-hour drive to the Delta region from Rangoon is now a military obstacle course. Checkpoints have sprung up on passable roads, with police officers in freshly-ironed blue uniforms and matching camouflage helmets stopping cars. “Where are you going? Why do you want to come here?” is the common refrain.

Immigration police with clipboards check passports against a handwritten “wanted list” of foreigners — many of them journalists. The BBC and CNN have already been deported. “No foreigners allowed; it’s the order,” said the immigration man at one checkpoint.

Past the barricades, further into the delta, a noisy procession was taking place. It was a funeral. Hundreds had taken a break from rebuilding their homes to pay their respects to the dead, snaking through the village behind the pallbearers, who were carrying the remains in a sort of improvised Sedan chair, garlanded in fluorescent pink fabric.

Few of the dead will receive such a dignified send-off. For them, it will be an unelected burial at sea, with their bodies washing out into the ocean before their families even know they are dead.

—The Guardian, London