Whither the writ of state?

THE Jamia Hafsa saga will go down in Pakistan’s history as a tragedy of incalculable proportions. That a place of learning and worship was turned into living hell is a matter of deep sorrow and torment. The horrifying deaths of girls and boys and women and men – with estimates ranging from over 100 to 1300 – is an occasion for mourning for the entire country. Scores of girls and boys are unaccounted for.

The dead and the missing will be grieved by affected families for the rest of their lives. And it will scar the psyche and body politic of the affected communities and Pakistani society at large for a long time to come.

Certainly, those at the helm of the machinery of the state need to be held accountable for the political and military decisions leading to the catastrophe. However, the primary responsibility for the carnage must lie with the Ghazi brothers and their militant cohorts. It is they who militarised young impressionable minds, violated the sanctity of a mosque by introducing weaponry into a place of worship and learning, and deliberately and repeatedly provoked the state – over a period of several months – to force it take the kind of desperate action that has just been witnessed.

The Ghazi brothers and their militant collaborators are also primarily responsible for trapping non-combatant students in the complex and causing their deaths. If they had an iota of humanity, they would have first negotiated with the government to enable them to leave.

The Jamia Hafsa episode raises questions that go to the foundations of the state. The highest functionaries of the state have made repeated statements about upholding the ‘writ of the state’. Such statements are now increasingly frequent and, prior to the Jamia Hafsa calamity, have also been heard with respect to the situation in Balochistan, Fata, Karachi, etc. That the government has to use force repeatedly to enforce the ‘writ of the state’ may be indicative of a serious crisis of the state, impinging on its very stability.

The government’s concern regarding the enforcement of the writ of the state is certainly legitimate. However, its record of selective enforcement of the writ renders the legitimacy of its actions questionable. The highest functionaries of the ruling military regime have repeatedly stated that they cannot allow the existence of ‘a state within the state.’ Yet, it is now an open secret that the military intelligence agencies have created a state within a state and the military does not consider itself bound by the requirements that the writ of the state imposes on it. Rather, a ‘military sub-state’ has emerged, with the writ of this sub-state resting above the writ of the nation-state.

The present regime is a product of the adventurism of the military sub-state. Its writ has been imposed over the writ of the Constitution and the rule of law. The writ of the state emanates from the body of basic laws enshrined in the Constitution. And a state bereft of the rule of law cannot claim the privilege of enforcing any writ or authority. Being a product of the violation of the writ of the state, the present regime has further compromised the writ of the state by allowing its political surrogates around the country to develop domains of their own.

These domains exercise their own writs, occasionally superseding the writ of the state. The Chaudhrys in Gujrat, the Mehers in Ghotki or the Shirazis in Thatta are only some of the domain powers that have been allowed to flourish. May 12 in Karachi was also one such occasion that earned congratulatory cheers from General Musharaf.

Under the circumstances, if some private individuals chose to take the cue from precedence set by the military sub-state and decide to resort to a venture in adventurism of their own, it should not be entirely surprising. The Ghazi brothers appear to have taken cues from the misdemeanors of military sub-state in other respects as well. The Jamia Hafsa crisis began with the demolition of illegal mosques in the Islamabad area by the Capital Development Authority. Reportedly, the Ghazi brothers were engaged in land grabbing operations and building mosques on vacant land was one way of claiming subsequent control and ownership. Jamia Hafsa itself stands on encroached land – an encroachment that was condoned by the military regime.

Ironically, the military officer class has also perfected the art of land grabbing. Vast tracts of land allotted to the army for military purposes as well as new land acquired more recently have been turned into housing schemes for the military officer class. The only difference between the military and professional land grabbers is that the former have managed to create rules that bestow a veneer of legitimacy on their actions, while the latter have to operate under the cover of mosques and madressahs or in the realm of illegitimacy altogether. In either case, the writ of the state stands compromised.

The decades-long military interference in the political process has created multiple schisms between different facets and organs of society and state. One such schism has emerged, rather clearly, between the political and military constituents, with long tenures of military or military-dominated governments having stymied the political component. Now it appears that the military sub-state has itself spawned divergent interest groups within itself, with each one defining and attempting to shape the ‘writ of the state’ in terms of its own narrow interest.

Jamia Hafsa appears to be a victim of such conflicts within the military sub-state and is highlighted by two intelligence failures. One, official statements have been made that the militants in Jamia Hafsa complex were heavily armed with rocket launchers, grenades, gas masks, night-vision goggles, and AK-47 and kalishnikov rifles, some of them fitted with telescopes. Footage to that extent was also shown on the electronic media.

The fundamental question that arises now is: how did such weaponry manage to enter Islamabad and find storage in the Jamia Hafsa complex? Complicity is writ large, but a state that cannot enforce its writ on its borders or in its own capital city cannot command the credibility to enforce its writ in the rest of the country.

Two: for months now the Jamia Hafsa complex was under the notice of intelligence agencies. The operation that the Jamia Hafsa brigade launched to ‘arrest’ Chinese nationals involved the journey of a convoy of madrassah vehicles – loaded with stick-armed female and male students – to Sector F-8, the raiding of the parlour, and return to the complex with the captives and must have taken more than an hour or two at the least. That intelligence agencies were not alerted as soon as the convoy left the complex points to their incompetence or complicity.

There are two possible explanations of failure. One is that the intelligence agencies are completely inept and were never aware of the activities of the Ghazi brothers and their militant collaborators. Under the circumstances, it is pertinent to ask if consideration should not be given to disbanding these inept agencies in order to save billions of rupees of taxpayers’ money that these agencies are wasting.

Two, it is likely that sections of the military sub-state are responsible for the Ghazi brothers’ misadventure. After all, circumstantial evidence relating to the intelligence agencies’ patronage of several militant groups – many of them based in madressahs – has been visible for years. The term ‘military-mullah alliance’ is not used in an empty context.

That these non-state groups have attempted to develop – with protection and patronage from secret sources within the military sub-state – autonomous power bases of their own cannot be unexpected. The confidence that the Ghazi brothers exuded all along the crisis can perhaps be attributed to the support that they may have commanded from within the military sub-state apparatus. That one of the Ghazi brothers was implicated in a terrorist act and was bailed out by Ejazul Haq – son of the former military dictator and now a minister in General Musharraf’s regime – is indicative of the support bases that militants command within the military sub-state apparatus.

The dithering that the government showed in dealing with the Jamia Hafsa crisis over the last six months and the absence of a unified political command that was discernable during the weeklong crisis is indicative of conflicting power centres within the military sub-state apparatus and the impotency of the political constituent of the state. Constitutionally, the prime minister is the chief executive of the country. However, Shaukat Aziz was clearly not the person in charge, but issued statements now and then to maintain an aura of relevance. Four days into the military action, Shaukat Aziz stated that there were no foreigners in Lal Masjid. Two days later Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi confirmed the presence of foreign elements.

Either intelligence agencies had no information about the presence of foreign elements or Shaukat Aziz was not informed correctly. Either way, the implications for the ability of the state to exercise its writ are worrisome. In fact, it appeared that the ‘elected’ part of the government headed by Shaukat Aziz was not in control and the entire operation was policy-directed by the army. If the government is beholden to the army – a salaried agency of the state – then the crisis of the writ of the state is located within the state apparatus itself.

Events during the weeklong Jamia Hafsa crisis have shown that the military sub-state is fractured and is acting incoherently. Lack of coordination between political and military moves is a standard recipe for instability in any state. However, emerging conflicts within the military sub-state is beginning to compound the instability. Religious, sectarian and ethnic militants spawned by the different elements of the sub-state are now out of the control of their ‘handlers’ and are challenging the state at large.

Strengthening the writ of the nation-state will require that the military sub-state is dismantled and all state agencies, including the military’s General Head Quarters and intelligence agencies are made to operate within the parameters of the Constitution and law and are rendered accountable to Parliament.

London moot a non-event

THE word ‘opposition’ must have been loosely used at the multi-party conference in London to embrace all the participants. The MMA heads a provincial government in coalition with the ruling party and earlier helped the president retain his uniform through a deal. Does it qualify as an opposition party?

The venerable leader of the opposition in parliament is from the MMA, at least on paper. This does not, however, change the MMA’s correlation with the ruling party. The leader of the opposition is in the wrong place anyway; he should be conducting advanced-level courses on the Politics of Double Entendre at some HEC-approved institution of higher learning.

The PML-Q’s top echelon is substantially made up of inductees from other parties, mainly from the PML-N and also the PPP. It is unclear if the parties regard them as on secondment to the ruling clique, or as prodigals who will return when fortunes change.

The Tehrik-i-Insaf is said to be a one-man opposition ‘party’, if there is such a thing. If so, then its chief must be the only one to bring his entire party along to the conference.

While not in the same league as winning the cricket World Cup, or setting up a cancer hospital, the Tehrik chief’s supreme achievement in the political field has been to single-handedly rattle and unnerve the MQM, all the way to London. No individual or party, as the Jamaat-i-Islami would ruefully concede, can match this feat. That is saying something, even if a truce of sorts descended after some hard-edged, but colourful, trading of insults.

Still, it has to be acknowledged that the MQM, by virtue of its May 12 performance, did more to unsettle itself and its coalition partner, the PML-Q, than the rest of the opposition parties have been able to do individually or jointly.

Whatever became of the reference against the Tehrik chief? Or of his rejoinder that the ‘battle of references’ would open up a can of worms? No one apparently wants that. The issue of references rests.

The Lal Masjid must have weighed heavily on the mind of the PML-N chief who convened and chaired (also financed?) the London meeting. Apart from the grief it caused, the Lal Masjid showdown swept the conference off the front pages of newspapers, and off TV screens as the lead story. All credit to him for sticking with it despite the media’s relegation of his effort to fourth place after Lal Masjid, the storms and floods, and the CJ issue.

The PPP’s actions, or rather that of its chairperson’s, are as usual hard to fathom. Is the PPP an opposition party? While the good Makhdoom sat with the opposition leaders at the conference table with a look that said everything, or nothing, the PPP chairperson was readying to saddle up and ride again, for the third time, to do her duty to the country. Secure your rear and flanks as she comes riding in is, perhaps, the likeliest advice pragmatists will offer to her adversaries — and more so to her would-be partners.

Where in all this does the ‘Charter of Democracy’ stand? Whatever happened to it anyway?

What the London meeting has achieved, and what will come out of it, is the big question. There have been London meetings of the opposition before but those failed to dislodge any military dictator, or prevent new ones from emerging.

Something the opposition parties understandably find hard to digest is the fact that they have always joined, never led, a popular movement or protest. The PPP in the early 1970s, and the Awami Party in East Pakistan, being the exception.

The lawyers’ movement for an independent judiciary is a model the political parties would do well to learn from. Instead, they have been jostling at the lawyers’ rallies to register their presence, and climbing over one another to bake their chapattis on a tawa made hot by the lawyers. But for the lawyers’ good sense, their movement would have been hijacked months ago by the opposition parties and led to a dismal end.

All the rallies, strikes, marches and the rest of the bunkum organised most frequently by the religious parties, and often enough by others, including the ruling party, have amounted to naught. They have only created hardships for the citizens whose reaction, if put into words, would come under the head of unparliamentary language. The citizens’ reaction is no different when they face hardships on the streets during VVIP and VIP movements.

The political parties, including the party in power, who tirelessly sermonise on democracy have themselves been a big hurdle in the way of genuine democracy. Winning an election does not give free rein to the winner, our politicians must learn, nor is losing one a reason to begin flirtatious visits to the GHQ.

The next election has to be won on performance, and through delivering on promises, not through oppressive tactics to obstruct freedom of information, stifle dissent and harass the opposition. Good governance has to be just that, not an exercise in lavish spending on false advertising and deceitful public relations, something the ruling party has come to excel at. Finally, the law has to be understood as being applicable to all, not just the ruled or the opposition.

However much the opposition parties may shout for an independent judiciary, and a free media, the reality is different. By their deeds and actions, the main opposition parties, during the ten years of rule between them, abundantly showed that they did not relish having to live with the twin ‘menace’ of a free judiciary and a free media. There is nothing to indicate it will be any different the next time.

The country now, or in the past, has not been presided over by democrats. The lament is that there are none on the horizon.

The new awkward squad

GORDON Brown's first masterstroke as prime minister may be about to produce his first headache. By launching his government as a ministry of all the talents, finding room for non-politicians and even (in the form of Lord Ashdown) offering cabinet places to members of other parties, Mr Brown impressed everyone who had feared he might lead a narrow government.

He used the appointments to show open-mindedness, to signal a shift in tone and to disconcert opposition parties. The Liberal Democrats are still swooning from the shock.

All this worked as Mr Brown must have planned. But now he faces the consequences. Three weeks into office, his new ministers are testing their freedoms to the limit. The first of these is Mark Malloch Brown, appointed to the Foreign Office as minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations, with the right to attend cabinet.

Lord Malloch-Brown, as he has become, has a strong pedigree as a top UN official and Iraq war critic. His unexpected arrival in government puts welcome meat on the bones of multilateralism. The fact that the US administration is not impressed by his appointment counts in his and Mr Brown's favour. But the new minister pushed his luck at the weekend with a Daily Telegraph interview that strayed from outspoken to arrogant.

Pronouncing that Britain and America were no longer "joined at the hip", he painted himself as a wise old dog to David Miliband's young pup: "It's fine for me to be, for the first time in my life, the older figure, the wise eminence behind the young foreign secretary." He went on to say: "I think David Miliband will score a hit when he goes to Washington. They know me very well."

No wonder Mr Miliband appeared on television the next morning to put him in his place. It is attractive to have ministers in government who do not have to worry about the constraints of hierarchy. But the result is confusion: what sort of relationship does Mr Brown actually intend to have with Washington?

Another outsider is also beginning to learn just how junior the place of a junior minister can be. Digby Jones, the former head of the CBI, now investment minister, has not joined Labour.

––The Guardian, London