Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared on the floor of the house that former president and ex-army chief, Gen (R) Pervez Musharraf would be tried for treason under Article 6 of the constitution of Pakistan for imposing emergency in the country on November 3, 2007.

However, he has conveniently not pressed for the former Army Chief’s trial as a perpetrator of the Oct 12, 1999 coup. Is this because the latter trial, if instituted, would call into question the role of many other important personages?

Is he afraid that such a trial would include people all the way from the Prime Minister himself to the current Chief Justice of Pakistan, the sitting Army Chief, Gen. Pervez Ashfaq Kiyani, other retired and serving military officers as well as a host of parliamentarians who currently grace the house with their august presence?

What kind of a blurred vision is this and will it lead to all four corners of justice having been served?

Now that the incumbent democratic government has decided that the supreme judiciary should try a military ruler for his alleged misdeeds so that others in uniform may take heed and desist from adventurism in future, wouldn’t it be in the fitness of things if the deeds of earlier military generals were also called into question, albeit posthumously, and the national psyche purged of the burden of guilt that it has carried for the past so many decades?

These generals too abrogated the constitution and were as guilty as Gen Musharraf. In fact, one of them went so far as to allow the country to be torn asunder while he, like Nero, made merry and the nation’s army had to bear the absolute ignominy of surrendering to the Indians.

The prime minister would emerge more of a true-blue statesman if he were to go the whole hog and track back to the date when it all started – October 12, 1999.

JAVED ANSARI Karachi