A laugh

Published June 4, 2000

WHEN governments in this country are dismissed, petitions are filed in the Supreme Court, thousands of words are written by lawyers, and then thousands of words are written by judges delivering judgments.

To save labour, time and money, and to make it quicker and simpler for judges, lawyers, and laymen alike to grasp the essentials of these repetitious petitions and judgments in which it is only the names of the petitioners and respondents which change, could they not be standardized? For instance, for corruption, the petitioners could simply write: "Refer to Form Krupt K1", which the respondents could answer with : "Denied - in terms of Form Krupt K2"; for telephone tapping, "Refer to Form Teltap TT 1" and "Denied - in terms of Form Teltap TT 2 "would serve the purpose, and so on and so forth. A one-page judgment could then be written by the judges simply by ordering the Registrar to 'Print out Snooze 1'.

May I recommend that my friend Khalid Anwer, master of English and legalize prose, of petitioning and responding, compile a book of suitable forms. How effectively he attacked telephone tapping as the respondent's counsel in the matter of Benazir's petitition challenging her second dismissal (CP 59/96). Worth a read in his written statement is "Sixth Ground of the Dissolution Order : Illegal and unconstitutional phone tapping and eavesdropping". To reproduce excerpts :

".....it is necessary to discuss certain constitutional dimensions of the illegal phone tapping and eavesdropping........ the Constitution is based on the trichotomy of powers...... Although the three branches are inter-linked to a certain extent, e.g., the main organ of the executive, the Cabinet, is collectively responsible to the National Assembly.... Each pillar of the State must have the assurance that its correspondence and communications will not be illegally intercepted or interfered with...... What was going on was an invisible and silent surveillance being carried out deliberately and intentionally, in full awareness of the illegality of what was being done. The intent and the act were both mala fide and unlawful; the damage done had constitutional reverberations......

"The phone tapping and eavesdropping was being done by the Intelligence Bureau ("IB") which works directly under the control of the Prime Minister ... In the case of Judges, not only were the numbers at the Judges' rest house in Islamabad and Murree under surveillance, but the numbers of the following Judges were also being individually tapped [41 names listed]....

"That quite apart from the attack on the judiciary as an institution is the violation of individual fundamental rights by this phone tapping and eavesdropping....."

Nawaz Sharif came in for his second round after the second dismissal of Benazir, and Senator Khalid Anwer joined his cabinet as law minister, and assumed his part of the collective responsibility, which, considering the extent of his learning, knowledge, and capability must be calculated as being at least ten times more than that of, say, the man who was Nawaz's education minister, Ghous Ali Shah.

Nawaz and his government and his intelligence agencies in their turn telephone tapped and eavesdropped, also not sparing Judges and officials of the Supreme Court, as revealed by attorney-general Aziz Munshi in his arguments during the hearing of the petition filed by a number of parliamentarians challenging the second Nawaz dismissal (CP 63/99). Khalid appearing on behalf of the petitioners quite naturally had the decency to condemn the "tapping of the telephones of the Chief Justice of Pakistan and other Judges of the superior judiciary and called it a shameful act."

Now, to eavesdropping on others than judges and 'high-ups'. Moinuddin Khan, a Pakistani banker, happily living and working abroad, in early 1998 suddenly felt the urge to serve his country and allowed himself to be persuaded to return and head the Central Board of Revenue. When visiting Islamabad I used to call on him to discuss problems Karachi's stevedores were having with the excise collectorate. Whatever files or correspondence Moin was shown on the matter inevitably brought from him the remark, "Well, I see no problem," to which my response was to ask him to sort it out with his men. He promised to do so but never managed to get through to the obdurate taxmen right up to the December 1998 day when he read in his morning papers that he had been sacked by Nawaz and replaced by Iqbal Farid (jailed by this government for corruption, and released on hs paying back Rs. 10 million he had borrowed).

On each visit to Islamabad I used to dine with Moin and he did likewise when in Karachi. Suddenly, sometime in the second half of the year all communication from him ceased. I could not get through to him on the telephone and he never called back. So I faxed him asking why he was not responding, bemoaning the fact that it had not taken much time for him to convert himself into a proper Pakistani civil servant. This brought forth a call from a disturbed Moin, whispering down the line that he was calling from Lahore from the house of his sister-in-law's brother-in-law to explain his silence and to tell me that either my phone or his phone or both our phones were tapped. He had been visited by none less than the chief of the Intelligence Bureau, Chaudhry Manzoor, who recounted to him the exact dates upon which we had met, warned him that it would be in his interest not to consort with me as I was a 'Desh ka dushman'. I could do nothing but laugh helplessly and tell Moin that he was even a greater fool than I had thought. My phone, I said, has been tapped since Jinnah died in 1948. The idiotic IB men were probably listening in to this present call as well. What a waste of time and money, for I write each week and what I have to say is public knowledge. The IB would do better to spend their time and energy seeking out all the 'hidden hands' that do so much damage.

Sure enough, when Moin returned to Islamabad he was again visited by an irate Chaudhry who berated him for having told me that the IB had my line tapped, and thus provoked me into abusing him (Chaudhry was later sacked by Nawaz).

The ways of our governments are, to say the least, bizarre. On October 8 of that same year, a Thursday, I was rung by Saifur Rahman asking me to fly to Islamabad post haste as Mian Sahib wanted to meet me (the 'Desh ka dushman'). But he is coming here next week, can't he meet me then, I asked. Saif requested me not to 'inkaar karo' the Mian as what he wanted to discuss was to my benefit. I explained that there was no question of 'inkaar' but simply that I could not come that week as I had to be in Karachi on Sunday for the ground-breaking ceremony of the school our family was founding. Saif's immediate reaction was to praise us for our astute business acumen as schools were most profitable ventures. It had to be carefully explained to him that the school was to be located in Macchar Colony (so named as mosquitos in Lyari outnumber men) and was to be run by the Citizens Foundation for the poor children of the area. No money would be taken home. He was nonplussed.

Late on Sunday night Commander Zahid, Nawaz's protocol officer, called from the PM's house telling me that Nawaz's programme for Monday had just been settled and I should be in Islamabad before noon. Impossible, I told him, if I ask PIA for a seat I'll be told there are none available until 2001. Not impossible for Zahid though. It was arranged for me to fly to Islamabad at noon on Monday and see the Mian that evening.

Meeting the Mian, in or out of power, was always amusing. The first question he would inevitably ask was whether I still thought he was 'krupt'. I don't only think so, I would respond, I know so. That evening, after his usual greeting and question, he told me he had been following my columns of late in which I had advocated the imposition of governor's rule in Sindh and he would like me to be his governor in the troubled province. It won't work, I told him. He would phone me every morning and tell me to do five things, four of which will be manifestly wrong. And one of the first things I would do is to sack his hand-picked police chief Rana Maqbool. And I would not be at the airport whenever he arrived in or left Karachi. But in any case, all that was irrelevant because there is no way in which I could accept a job in any government and lose whatever credibility I have.

Nawaz is now in jail, and the government appeal asking for the death sentence has been admitted by the Sindh High Court. Not fair. Justice must be evenhanded. Will the government hang Benazir and all the other delinquents?

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