Vague picture of 18th amendment

[Chauhdary]

The fear of an independent judiciary

SOME political observers have taken exception to the role played by Nawaz Sharif in pushing the Eighteenth Amendment through in the National Assembly. The question being posed is: was he conned into throwing his weight behind Zardari? Or did he bite the bullet of his own accord?

There was a time not long ago when Nawaz Sharif (NS) was riding high in popularity and esteem. Gallup Pakistan and several other reputed opinion survey groups came up with findings putting NS at the pinnacle of the popular approval rate in Pakistan. He was commanding approval ratings hovering in the 70s, whilst Zardari’s ratings were marooned in the dismal teens. There was nary a doubt which of the two excited the imaginations of the Pakistanis — ordinary folks and not too many of them intellectuals — about leadership of a better tomorrow compared to this pitiful present.

NS endeared himself with the man on the street, in general — and selectively with an intelligentsia that still disdained him for his allegedly woolly intellect — because of his forthright stewardship of the movement to restore the deposed CJ Iftikhar Chaudhry and other notables of the top judiciary. He also articulated all the relevant nuances about the independence of the judiciary. So focused was he in his crusade to have the judiciary restored to its pedestal of the state’s prime watchdog of the people’s rights that many pretended to forget that not long ago the jiyalas of the same NShad brazenly assaulted the ramparts of the very same Supreme Court of Pakistan.

Nawaz Sharif’s rising popularity graph at that tryst of the nation with its desired destiny could well be likened — with some poetic license, of course — to the phoenix rising from its own ashes.

But, then, only a few months down the nation’s tortuous journey under the flag of a governing elite that claims to be of the people but has earned notoriety for doing everything to rob them of their rights, Sharif’s acolytes and factotums conjured up a deal with their nemeses from the PPP. They put their heads together — over a period of nine hectic months — with representatives of other parties in the Rabbani Committee to craft a constitutional amendment that was supposed to sweep aside the detritus the Musharraf team had left behind.

However, as this scribe pointed it out in his previous piece on the subject, the 18th amendment is a clever ruse to gift the politicos with a crafty leverage to barricade the judiciary’s independence and bend it to their will.

It would be plainly naïve of NS or any of his lieutenants to feign ignorance or pretend they were duped into it by Raza Rabbani or other leaders of the regime. There were some very eminent and alert members of the Nawaz Sharif team — men as bright and wide-eyed as Ahsan Iqbal and Ishaq Dar who, besides being hands-on have continually enjoyed the trust of their chief.

They knew exactly what was the bait being woven into the matrix of the 18th Amendment to trap the top judiciary. They couldn’t be unmindful of the trap doors that would open up to devour the judiciary’s constitutional independence like hungry alligators lying in wait under a creaky bridge. In other words, they played along in full consciousness and became willing parties to a last desperate attempt by the buccaneers in Islamabad’s tallest houses — who resisted restoring the CJ until the very last minute — to chain the dragon they suspect may devour them one day.

It may seem ironic, but NS and his team of loyalists have, at last, done constitutionally what they had set out to achieve by raw muscle power when Pakistan’s ‘first home-grown’ PM was in the saddle a decade and more ago.

Any benefit of doubt that a charitable reader of the unfolding scenario may be inclined to lend to NS and his cohorts, i.e. they were taken for a ride in a state of benign neglect by them, is quickly obviated by the robust defence of the 18th amendment flaunted on popular television channels by Ahsan Iqbal. Mr Iqbal is too close to NS — an ineluctable character from his ‘kitchen cabinet’ — to pretend that his advocacy of the ‘shady’ deal is entirely off his own bat and doesn’t reflect the ‘leader’s’ perception.

So it doesn’t sit well with a keen observer of the carefully choreographed act for any votary or partisan of NS to pretend that he didn’t know what he was signing on. He knew perfectly as well on this occasion as he did in 2000 when he received an amnesty from Musharraf in return for exile in Saudi Arabia.

Why did he do it? Why did he bite the bait, hook, line and sinker as the proverb says — if it were really some bait dangled before him? Why did he choose to go against his grain, the one he had been marketing with zest as his very own — his home-grown seed, so to speak — from the moment he returned from exile and got down to meeting the challenge of political re-incarnation like a rejuvenated gladiator thrown into the ring?

It doesn’t take a genius to reckon that Nawaz Sharif was swayed by the prospect of re-occupying the PM’s throne — from which he was no doubt trotted out most unceremoniously by a soldier of fortune. The 18th amendment removes the untenable impediment Musharraf had mischievously conjured up to strangulate both NS and BB. With BB gone and her widower unable to fit into her shoes, the road to PM’s House is now open to NS without fear of detours or road-blocks. So with light beckoning him so clearly at the end of the tunnel NS had no compunction in reviving relations with the man he had, not too long ago, denounced as ‘the greatest danger to democracy in Pakistan.’

That’s precisely what the leading lights of PML-N have been articulating, as best as they are capable of, for the benefit of the media and the people of Pakistan that NS has leaped into the fray with the sole intent of safeguarding democracy in Pakistan. That’s baloney.

Democracy will, henceforth, be under real threat because this innovation threatens to barricade the institution of judiciary, the anchor of democracy in any open and liberated society, and hold it in thrall to wily and unprincipled politicos. Democracy will also be imperilled by the monster of dictatorship unleashed within the ranks of political parties by the authors of the 18th Amendment when they decided to do away with the mandatory need for elections within the party ranks.

In their convoluted perception of democracy our knights-in-the-shining-armour are discarding the only thing good that an autocrat like Musharraf had tried to inject into the bone-dry sinews of our political parties. This innovation would suit NS as much it titillates the fancy of Zardari.

Zardari and his team-mates working behind the scenes managed to swing NS to their cause because he’s, potentially, as allergic to a robustly independent judiciary as Zardari is. But it would be stretching Zardari’s well-honed skills for wheeling-dealing to absurd heights if one were to believe that he converted an unwilling NS to his cause. The element of conning looks very slim, if not entirely non-existent, given NS’ eagerness to usher in a salubrious environment for his third stint as PM, which would give him an ‘honour’ that no body else in Pakistan has had, to date.

It ought to be admitted by NS and his team that the mask of democracy’s crusader and a champion of judicial independence that they had been hawking for so long has now come off for good. The people of Pakistan, with a sense of the political dynamics around them, will be loath to be conned by NS or any other ‘saviour’ of democracy and / or judiciary’s independence. In the end, it could well be the case of a crusader shooting himself in the foot to lay claim to martyrdom.

But one could still afford to be charitable to NS and say that he has thus far betrayed no rush to topple Zardari any time soon. The radiant face with which NS showed up at the pomp-and-pageantry surfeit signing ceremony at the Presidency in Islamabad said a lot about a man smugly confident about his own future and his tryst with destiny.

NS’s new-found confidence has manifested itself recently in the idea to let MQM stage their own mini-carnivals in Lahore, Rawalpindi and Multan. The two may need each other, come the next elections, to rub in their self-touted credentials of being ‘all-Pakistan parties.’ In return for some seats in urban Sindh, where MQM has struck deep roots, NS should have no regrets in letting MQM earn a toe-hold or two in Punjab, though it would still be a mismatch between a right-leaning PML-N and a left-inclined MQM. But then marriages of convenience are stuff of political expediency. So bon voyage to these two embarking on a road with no milestones.