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IT has repeatedly been said so many of Pakistan’s issues will disappear the day it finds itself capable of dispensing justice and enforcing the law indiscriminately and in a manner visibly above board.
The state should be able to send a murderer to meet their fate by convicting them in a court of law, by presenting irrefutable evidence. Sadly, when a system so breaks down that the capacity to gather evidence becomes extinct, those responsible for enforcing the law themselves violate it by using a variety of methods.
These methods can include demonising the accused via a media trial, where media or sections of it are complicit in the game, to the more alarming means of ‘dispensing justice’ through (for example) extrajudicial killings. Of course in between these extremes must sit the practice of testing the ability and endurance of an accused’s body to withstand pain under third-degree torture.
A new line of attack is now in evidence to put further pressure on the London-based MQM leader.
That the MQM has used violence as an arrow in its quiver regularly and effectively is now rarely disputed except by the party diehards. That the organisation has incurred the wrath of the state as a result is also a recorded fact. There is evidence that whenever its reported militant wing has been made to suffer, it has not forgotten the perpetrator. One need only count the number of policemen involved in the various operations against the MQM who are no more.
Most notable among them were those in the vanguard of the operation during the last administration of the former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, in the 1990s. Dozens of these policemen, in cases even 10 years later, were hunted down and killed by ‘unidentified’ gunmen.
One need only go through newspaper files carefully to come up with a staggering tally which numbers several dozen. The only common denominator between these murdered policemen was that they actively took part in that anti-MQM operation.
The PPP-led operation, during which MQM leader Altaf Hussain’s brother was allegedly killed in a tit-for-tat action after the assassination of then chief minister Abdullah Shah’s brother, may have seriously disrupted the MQM’s militant wing. But apparently this degradation came about mostly as a result of information extracted under torture and extrajudicial killings. I recall interviewing the then interior minister retired major general Naseerullah Babar and quizzing him over extrajudicial measures. He aggressively defended his government and law-enforcement machinery’s actions saying they were confronted with an ‘unusual situation which warranted unusual measures’.
While this action may have defanged what is seen as the party’s militant wing, it was only for a while as it also deepened the sense of alienation and disaffection among the supporters and more significantly the cadres allowing for a new generation of diehard volunteers. A near parallel can be found in the creation of the Haqiqi faction of the MQM. While most of the then armed workers broke away with the militant wing leader Afaq Ahmad, within a matter of weeks a new crop of teenaged, hitherto unknown militant was witnessed attacking the ‘White House’, the Landhi stronghold of the breakaway Haqiqi leader.
However, the one major difference between now and then is that most of the partymen involved, from the second-tier leaders to the worker, had all seen what they felt was the magic of their inspirational leader at close quarters. The leader’s grip over all party affairs was phenomenally firm.
Altaf Hussain’s over two decades in self-exile, his reported ill-health and the relatively recent stress of facing a number of criminal investigations by the Metropolitan Police may have weakened his hand. The speculation surrounding the fate of two key witnesses in the Dr Imran Farooq case must also be taking its toll. Therefore, a new line of attack is now in evidence to put further pressure on the London-based MQM leader. Only lawyers can comment on the legal aspects of the videotaped ‘dying declaration’ of MQM murder convict Saulat Mirza, whose statement seems to heave earned him at least a temporary reprieve from the hangman’s noose.
But it was easy to see the statement, especially given who may have been responsible for taping it and releasing a heavily edited version to the media, was right out of a psychological warfare manual. Its specific purpose (I am told unless a statement is made in front of a magistrate it has little legal value) was to spook the MQM leadership as well as encourage other party militants to break their silence and vows of loyalty.
However, deploying such methods can be counterproductive. Given the questions about their legal and moral propriety, while they only can serve to confirm what the opponents and critics feel they have always known, these can also very quickly serve to fuel paranoia among the party’s larger support base that it is being singled out in a one-sided exercise and push it deeper into the arms of the hardliners.
That’s why enforcement of the law has to be visibly above board. All attempts in the past to deploy such means to defang the party have failed. Despite the changed circumstances, what is the guarantee that the current exercise, if it is again seen as controversial, will not send many workers into hibernation only to resurface once the heat is off?
The MQM leader may be a lot of things but, seriously, do Saulat Mirza ‘de-briefers’ want us to believe Altaf Hussain is so without sense that he’d order a murder over an open phone line? What is a mere improbability to unbiased commentators will seem like outright persecution to the loyal supporters.
If the idea is to accept an MQM as a political entity minus its militant wing and violent legacy, it is incumbent on the scriptwriters to adhere to the law. If all the charges are true, there is enough there to act on. Why embellish the truth and run the risk of making it look like a lie?
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, March 21st, 2015
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