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THE chaos of the past several weeks, triggered by the fast-approaching retirement date of the chief justice of Pakistan on Oct 25 and concerns that his successor may take decisions signalling the beginning of the end of the hybrid government, looks like it may have peaked.
Whether these concerns are valid or whether it is the paranoia of a set-up that lacks mass support, legitimacy and credibility, due to an election where the overall result may not have reflected the will of those who voted, is difficult to say.
What is clear is that there would be few examples of a country amending its constitution to address such concerns pinned to an inability to predict the behaviour or actions of just over a dozen men and a woman. Many government politicians have described the toing and froing of the past weeks as the ‘beauty of democracy’. I humbly disagree.
Let me tell you why. By the time you read these lines, either the so-called ‘consensus’ (with the JUI-F and some smaller players) would have resulted/ or would be set to soon result in the passage of a constitutional amendment, clipping the wings of the judiciary; or, what Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari called the “brutal majority with their extra numbers”, would have manifested itself with the same result. You’d agree such statements have no ‘beauty’ about them.
There is always the third possibility that all attempts to break the impasse would have failed, stripping the hybrid buffer and pitting the establishment and at least eight judges of the Supreme Court against each other in direct confrontation. How things spin away from such an eventuality is difficult to plot.
If the amendment is passed, the hybrid government will think it is safe from any threats to its existence, at least in the short term.
While the government has continued to say it has the numbers (whatever the factual position) to pass the amendment but wishes to reach a consensus in order to further the democratic cause, those they have tried to engage with have had their own reasons to enter into a dialogue.
For example, the PTI’s game plan seems to be to buy time to somehow push the clock until the date changes to Oct 26, so that a new chief justice can take over and a new dynamic is triggered which, they hope, will eventually lead to the ouster of this government.
They won’t care much whether this ouster comes through the election tribunals or somehow via the annulment of the February elections, as long as any fresh election returns Imran Khan to the prime minister’s office with much greater authority and powers than his last stint.
The JUI-F’s Maulana Fazlur Rehman must be loving the spotlight that’s on him. Let’s not forget he was a loyal ally who even brought his cadres to Islamabad to ease the pressure on Nawaz Sharif and his party when Imran Khan was the prime minister with the full backing of the then establishment. But he was treated shabbily once the new government came into existence after the February elections.
Small things matter hugely in Pakistani culture, such as joining in the wedding celebrations of each other’s close family members, and even more important, making sure that in moments of loss and grief, such as the passing of family elders, people are not left alone.
The PML-N and PPP were guilty of ignoring these significant gestures, and this must have led to the maulana feeling slighted. In addition, the replacement of his party’s nominee for governor KP with a PPP politician was something that would not have met with his approval because it stripped his party, with stakes in the province, of the only office they could have had there.
This forced the JUI-F into taking a paradoxical position, aligning itself with the PTI, which had routed his party from its home base of KP. There can be no denying that the maulana, apart from the one fault of letting his party vote for Gen Musharraf, has been pretty consistent in taking democratic positions.
As this column’s last few lines were being finalised, a five-member PTI team that met the party’s founder Imran Khan in Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail had emerged from the meeting and told the media that Khan had directed his team members to continue to engage with the maulana on this important piece legislation.
At the same time, PPP leader Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari told the media outside the maulana’s Islamabad home, in the company of the chief JUI negotiator Kamran Murtaza, that the two parties had agreed on a draft amendment that the PML-N would also support, and that the PTI should make up its mind as to what it wanted to do.
It appeared that the PTI’s strategy to buy time had run its course and that perhaps now the JUI-F and PTI may part ways in terms of how they vote and support the amendment. Of course, there is many a slip between cup and lip. And the job isn’t done till it is.
If the amendment is passed, the hybrid government will think it will remove any threats to its existence at least in the short term. The longer term is another story. So far, Imran Khan does not seem to have bowed to the pressure exerted by a number of court cases and his imprisonment.
There can be no doubt he continues to enjoy considerable support across the country. So far, this support has not been able to exert enough pressure from the streets for either his release from prison or to seriously challenge those at the helm.
In our experience, sometimes even the smallest of sparks can trigger effective snowballing movements that can force change. In the absence of finding its way back to power through the legal system, the PTI’s only bet will be its large support base pulling off something spectacular at some point.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2024
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