Men in Khaki

PIA has been virtually quarantined from European airports by the EU in Brussels and most of its ageing and rickety, poorly-maintained, aircraft can’t land on any EU airport. Once upon a time cited as one of Asia’s smartest and most efficient airlines, PIA, then pride of Pakistan, has become a moth-eaten and decaying outfit on General Musharraf’s watch at the helm of Pakistan, as has the rest of the country.

However, instead of fixing the PIA bigwigs—mostly cronies of his and Shaukat Aziz’—who have brought so much ignominy and shame on Pakistan, the commando general opts to pick up a fight with the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry, and embarks on a nihilistic course of ‘fixing’ an ‘inconvenient’ head of Pakistan’s supposedly independent judiciary.

In a bizarre drama of high-handedness and brazen arrogance, General Musharraf summoned an unsuspecting CJP to his ‘Army House’ in Rawalpindi, on March 9, where he was given a thorough ‘dressing-down’ by the general, with his errand-boy Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, smugly looking on.

Justice Chaudhry was declared ‘non-functional’ on the spot, detained at the Army House for five hours and then taken straight to his official residence in Islamabad to be virtually incarcerated there and cutoff from the outside world. He was kept incommunicado from the world beyond his opulent house, in virtual house arrest, with his phone lines gone, his cell phone rendered dead, his television cables cut, his internet access blocked. No newspapers were allowed to dodge the dragnet of security agencies that had sprung around the CJP’s residence in virtually a jiffy.

What prompted Musharraf’s wrath on the poor Iftikhar Chaudhry and triggered a macabre exercise into making a ‘horrible example’ of the head of Pakistan’s apex court?

The trigger or catalyst was said to be an open letter from a show-boy, pseudo-lawyer, Naeem Bokhari of Tahira Syed-fame (his ex-wife, a leading crooner of Pakistan who brought him fame and fortune in her dowry). Bokhari’s ‘open letter’ had catalogued a list of charges against Chaudhry’s misuse of his office and authority. But if ‘open letters’ are sufficient reason in Pakistan to disgrace an exalted chief justice then why didn’t Musharraf lend any credence to a similar ‘open letter’ last year, written against his hogging and conflating the two offices of president and chief-of-army staff, by a dozen retired army generals and senior bureaucrats?

Apparently, the ‘fixing’ of what had long been suspected in the corridors of power in Islamabad as a maverick and errant CJP had been in the works under Musharraf’s wings for quite sometime.

And what had Justice Chaudhry done to provoke the commando leader Musharraf’s ire?

Well, the Chief Justice was being pro-active. He was deemed guilty of judicial activism. He was prying too close for comfort to the bastion of raw power wielded by the Musharraf-Shaukat combine. He was bent on taking notice of things—they call it suo motu in legal parlance—off his own bat. He was baring too many closets in the corridors of power in Islamabad and finding too many ‘discomforting’ skeletons in them. He’d to be stopped.

Justice Chaudhry did something unprecedented in the annals of Pakistan’s judiciary when last June he threw out as illegal and unconstitutional Shaukat Aziz’ back-handed sale of the Karachi Steel Mills, one of Pakistan’s prime national assets, to cronies from abroad. Aziz, an agent of western and Arab corporate interest, was stunned. Here was a Pakistani judge blocking his ‘mission achievable’ of doling out the blue-ribbon Pakistani assets to cronies and mentors abroad at throw-away prices.

PIA is being deliberately driven into the dumps so that one day the American-exported PM may blithely declare it to be a burden and then quickly put it on the block to go under the hammer of his crony auctioneers in the Privatization Commission and sold, not to the highest bidder but to one topping their list of favourites. But Justice Chaudhry was threatening to rob the robber- barons of their dreams because of his judicial activism.

What Presumably broke Musharraf’s back, and the backs of his khaki minions and cohorts at GHQ, was Justice Chaudhry lending a sympathetic hearing to the relatives and kin of hundreds of those picked up by the likes of ISI and never, since, heard of again. Some have been in oblivion for more than a year. Chaudhry took a stern notice of these wanton ‘disappearances’ and wasn’t disinclined from putting the ISI thugs and their mentors on the mat.

But Musharraf had a sharper axe to grind with the hyper-active judge.

Hell bent as Musharraf is on getting himself re-elected, in his darn uniform, for another five years, it’s a foregone thing that the opposition would challenge his deceit and rush to the apex court of Pakistan with a petition against him. Musharraf must have feared that a loose- cannon that Justice Chaudhry was deemed to be by him and his khaki cabal, life could become hell of a lot difficult for them. Therefore, pre-emption demanded that this thorn in the general’s side be removed before such a pass.

Whatever Musharraf did to humiliate a sitting Chief Justice of Pakistan had a clear purpose. It was part of his strategy to tell the people of Pakistan that he’s above the law of the land and that law stops at his door-step. He wanted to knock the fear of his khaki uniform into the hearts of the Pakistanis so they may think twice before challenging him at his game. That ‘official’ television clip of his splashed across the tele-screens at home and abroad said it all. He sat, in his crisp uniform, like a pharaoh on his throne, while a demure Justice Chaudhry sat across him meekly with a subdued smile. That reminded the world of a similar photo clip of four years ago taken, in similar fashion with the ‘father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, Dr. Qadeer Khan who was, similarly made a ‘horrible’ example.

Kicking the law in its teeth isn’t unusual as far as Musharraf’s track record as Pakistan’s latest Bonaparte is concerned. He came to power through the back door by toppling a popularly elected PM in a macabre drama in which he was painted as a ‘victim’. He quickly hijacked the Constitution of Pakistan and mutilated it beyond recognition by inserting his 17th amendment into its body, thus sanctifying all his illegal and ultra-constitutional antics. To him the law of the land, i.e. the constitution is nothing but a scrap of paper to be trashed at will. His predecessor, General Ziaul Haq, went on record declaring, with all the hubris in the world, that the constitution wasn’t worth the piece of paper it was written on to him and he could tear it whenever he wanted.

But this time around, Musharraf, despite his hauteur and swagger of a commando general, seems to have bitten more than he could chew.

The lawyers’ community of Pakistan has called his bluff and decided to beat him at his own game. They’ve risen in revolt, en masse, against his high-handedness because they think they are on a solid wicket. What he has done is so thoroughly unconstitutional and illegal that even a blind man could see through it. The country-wide agitation against the injustice done to Justice Chaudhry is a resounding clarion call by the judicial community of Pakistan that enough is enough and it’s time the head-strong autocrat was told, in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t a god.

The constitution gives no right to the President of Pakistan to dismiss or render ‘non-functional’ any judge of a High Court or the Supreme Court, let alone the country’s Chief Justice. Likewise, the composition of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC), mandated in haste to try the impugned CJP is equally illegal. Under the constitution the senior-most judge of the apex court must head it. That judge is Bhagwandas, who has a reputation for being independent and unimpressionable, like Justice Chaudhry. Musharraf timed his move against Chaudhry so that he could constitute the SJC while Bhagwandas happened to be on holiday in India. But absence from home doesn’t disqualify Baghwandas from heading the SJC. Musharraf may not trust him, but that’s Musharraf’s problem not of Bhagwandas.

The whole sordid and grisly episode smacks of what has been, for almost 50 years, the bane of Pakistan.

The men in khaki think they have a god-given right to rule over Pakistan by whatever means, fair or foul. There’s no sanctity of law with them if that law stands in their way. Musharraf has shown his disrespect for Pakistan’s laws in more ways than one. In fact he has violated the law more often, and more brazenly, than any of his Bonaparte predecessor. But, then, every Bonaparte also has his Waterloo. In his unbridled lust for absolute power, Musharraf may have unwittingly done what the Biblical Samson did: bringing down the temple upon him.