If President Asif Ali Zardari had peeped out from one of the front windows in Aiwan-i-Sadr on Sunday — and being a politician of considerable standing I am sure he must have done it a number of times — the outside scene may have given him the sense of being a besieged leader.

Though the huge parade area on the Jinnah Avenue in front of the President House had remained blocked with barbed wires and barricades since the days of Aiwan-i-Sadr’s previous occupant, General Pervez Musharraf, on Saturday the authorities completely sealed off the place. With dozens of containers parked on the eight-lane road and its adjoining open area, the place was being made to look like a ‘container terminal’ or some sort of a ‘dry port’.

Many more steel containers, boulders and barbed wires have been placed at other entry points like the Parliament Lodge Road, near the PTV headquarters, Radio Pakistan, Serena Hotel, thus blocking from all sides what is officially known as the ‘Constitution Avenue’.

If this was not enough to highlight the siege mentality currently prevalent in the federal capital, the administration threw several more security rings in and around Islamabad and on all the entry points from Rawalpindi and Murree, thus making it nearly impossible for anyone to commute between these towns and cities.

What amazed many people in Islamabad was that all this was happening when a popularly elected party, and not a military regime, was in power. In fact, many PPP supporters were not expecting this from their party which is not only a product of democratic struggle but for decades has remained in the forefront of such protest campaigns.

There have been times in Mr Zardari’s life when he was forcibly kept by the authorities either in jail, or by turning his place of stay, be it a hospital or a house, into sub-jail. But the present siege around Aiwan-i-Sadr has been ordered by the man himself. Since becoming the president he had already earned the reputation of ruling the country from behind the secure walls of Aiwan-i-Sadr, and having little or no link with the people. And now a threat of a protest march and possible ‘dharna’ or ‘sit-in’ has made him turn the entire area around the President’s House a ‘no go area’.

In fact, on Sunday some people were already calling it a ghost town.

The president has certainly many different ways of getting the information about political developments in the country, in this case everything about the lawyers-led opposition campaign. But one has every reason to believe that, like most other people in the country, he too must be surfing through various private television channels to watch live footage of the happenings in Lahore. Whether the day-long developments, particularly the late afternoon turnout of tens of thousands of opposition supporters on the streets, were a matter of concern for him, may not be known.

However, what one can say with authority is that another highly prominent person, sitting in his own government-allotted residence, and not very far away from the Aiwan-i-Sadr, was quite pleased with the developments. The deposed chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, too has confined himself to his house in the Judges’ Colony. As a matter of principle he is not participating in the lawyers-led protest campaign, even though it is principally aimed at restoring him to the office of the chief justice of Pakistan. But it’s not difficult to visualise that he must be extremely pleased with the impressive turnout in Lahore, and renewed pledge by the protesters to march on to Islamabad for a sit-in. Whether the latest campaign results in his restoration, however, remains uncertain.

But seasoned politician and a leading light of the lawyers’ campaign, Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan, is not at all worried. He is a veteran of many campaigns over the past three decades, and he knows what a continuous public pressure can do in terms of bringing about a change. “How long will they keep blocking the avenue to Islamabad,” he asked while talking to DawnNews in Lahore. “We will continue to march, will continue to knock at these barricades, and whenever they are removed, hundreds of thousands of people will throng the federal capital,” he said.

When will such a time come, nobody knows. But one thing is clear: it’s a real testing time for all those who believe in democracy and rule of law.

Tailpiece: Over the weekend, when police was battling the protesting lawyers in Punjab and when scores of steel containers were being brought to Islamabad to secure the Aiwan-i-Sadr, President Zardari sent a cheque of Rs1 million to the widow of the country’s best-known revolutionary poet, Habib Jalib. Earlier, PML-N leader Shahbaz Sharif had surprised many by reciting in public one of Jalib’s famous poems against Ayub Khan’s autocratic rule. One wonders if the two leaders know that Jalib not only struggled for the rule or law, justice and democracy, he was a declared secularist, a committed leftist, and was as much opposed to feudal lords’ and capitalists’ involvement in politics as he was against that of the mullah and the military.
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