WHOEVER counselled the federal cavaliers to drop their campaign to destabilise the Sindh government has done well by the country’s democracy that still needs oxygen to breathe.

There is no fun in making oneself a laughing stock by declaring that the federation was not interested in forcing a change in Sindh. One excited gentleman repeatedly claimed that a good number of PPP MPAs in Sindh were ready to cross the floor, and that the Murad Ali Shah government could not survive. The purpose of the federal information minister’s plan to fly to Karachi was not concealed: he was going to assume command of the operation to overthrow the Sindh government. One dispatch from the war headquarters assured the people of Sindh that their new chief minister also would be a Shah.

Explore: PTI's political engineering in Sindh isn't likely to work, but it will have serious consequences

These warriors did not realise that enforced defections are not only contrary to democratic politics, they also make the losing party more popular. The two other opposition parties in the Sindh Assembly — the MQM and PML-F, both the PTI’s coalition partners at the centre and both fiercely opposed to the PPP — realised this and hastened to distance themselves from the ‘get-Murad’ expedition.

It is surely time the government acquired the confidence to govern without demonising the opposition.

The PTI spokespersons also forgot that extra-democratic attacks on a battered and wounded PPP were helping it gain some ground. (A street wit thought some of the politicos in the ruling party who had earlier contested elections on PPP tickets were operating as its secret weapons.) Nor did they remember their leader’s straightforward declaration that he would grant the opposition anything it wanted, except calling a halt to accountability. This is a fair rule of the game that all parties need to follow.

Hysterics apart, Murad Ali Shah was asked to step down because his name had been put on the Exit Control List. The demand is in violation of the settled practice that nobody can be forced to quit a public office until he is convicted of a charge involving moral turpitude. That an office-holder may voluntarily quit is a different matter, and we don’t have such knights in shining armour.

A most recent example is that of Nawaz Sharif. He was not ousted from office until he was found guilty by the Supreme Court. If anyone is made liable to lose his right merely because his name has been put on the ECL without a judicial order, there will be no end to the havoc the executive authorities might cause.

The talk of putting Sindh under governor’s rule reached the Supreme Court’s ears and the warning against imposing governor raj on Sindh and the derailment of democracy has come not from a PML-N or PPP loyalist or a civil society disruptionist, but from the head of that very apex court whose judgement had set the PTI bandwagon rolling. Any student of politics can prove that a robust opposition will cause Pakistan much less harm than a single-party rule.

What did those banking on the ECL weapon gain from earning a rebuke from the chief justice of Pakistan when he expressed his dismay at scores of names having been placed on the ECL without any inquiry, turned down Farooq Naek’s plea to withdraw from Zardari’s defence, and ordered his name’s removal from the ECL?

Now it has become necessary to address the problems created by the abuse of the power to put names on the ECL. Such action amounts to a punishment and denial of a fundamental right to leave the country and to return to it. The Supreme Court had upheld this right even when Pakistan had not ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Now it has done this. In the bad old days, the law required that the person punished by being put on the ECL had to be duly informed (though most victims learnt of the action against them when they arrived at an airport to leave the country, and many did so after receiving relief from the superior judiciary).

The sole justification for putting a name on the ECL is the need to ensure continuity of legal proceedings against the person concerned as actions against dissidents or opposition parliamentarians cannot easily be sustained. In the present case, 172 people were put on the ECL before anyone was charged with an offence. That they had been named in a JIT report does not mean anything in law. The adoption by a Senate committee of an amendment to the law whereby a name will be put on the ECL on sustainable grounds is a step in the right direction.

The way a JIT report becomes public and causes a heated controversy in the media before the court has examined it is also a bizarre occurrence that is becoming common these days, along with an improvement in the media’s ability to find the poor men in whose names fake bank accounts are operated. These happenings affect the credibility of the accountability process and open space for arguments in favour of persons whose record may be too unfortunate to be defended.

As regards to the government, it will do itself good by leaving the accountability institutions to work freely beyond ensuring that they have access to files against all wrongdoers in its possession, so that proceedings cannot be considered selective.

It is surely time the government acquired the confidence to attend to governance without demonising the opposition because that is now becoming counterproductive. Regardless of the controversy about the manipulation of the 2018 elections, the PTI has been given the freedom to rule the country for five years. It still has a lot of goodwill and it can build upon it by helping the underprivileged fight off hunger, want and disease.

It has nothing to be afraid of except non-political hotheads in its ranks. And it must never forget the Persian proverb about the fate of those who dig wells for others to fall into.

Published in Dawn, January 3rd, 2019