Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui was elevated to judgeship by the joint malice of Nawaz Sharif, Iftikhar Mohammad Choudhary, and his brother, Irfan Siddiqui. And that is a lot of malice to go around.
And since 2011 he has been the bane of all those condemned by fate to seek justice in his court. Invariably the lawyers appearing before him have called him a liar, a hypocrite, a thug, and a benighted fool bigoted to the hilt.
Now at last, with an investigation coming up against him in the Supreme Judicial Council, Siddiqui, in an act of desperate preemption, has been compelled to speak out. And he has spoken out against his peers in the High Court, his subordinates in the NAB court, his superiors in the Supreme Court, and against the ISI, and the Army.
Now at last people who have suffered his frothing arrogance and wanton tyranny for years on end are likely to find relief by seeing his back. Poor devils! The supreme irony is that even the light at the end of the tunnel they have yearned so long to see, should issue from the backside of the same judge!
God dispenses His mercy in mysterious ways!
It is obvious that Siddiqui’s fusillade delivered at the Rawalpindi bar was the result of frayed patience, as much as it was a preemptive attack for what lies in store for him. That his patience gave way when it did, may have been a providential act of mercy for the state. For there were rumours swirling around, some from fairly credible sources, that a few judges will be marshaled to say in unison, that which Siddiqui blurted out solo. Justices Sardar Dost Mohammad Khan and Qazi Faiz Isa were being named as a part of this cabal. If these rumours are correct, and Siddiqui broke ranks to preemptively save his accursed hide, he has done a favour to us all.
The narrative that the Supreme Court and the Army high command are dead set to undermine “democracy”, of which Siddiqui’s outburst is the latest attempt, has gained a fair amount of currency. For months now our liberal intellectuals, Indian and U.S opinion makers, parts of our media, various NGOs, and our politicians who see harsh accountability ahead, have single mindedly built up this narrative. It is an irony of fate that it should have been a criminal like Nawaz Sharif who should have been the originator and moving spirit behind this campaign which found increasing purchase among the masses, as abuse against the army and the judiciary piled up with the passage of time.
And this had to happen because neither the S.C nor that Army had the same tools to blunt this narrative, as were available to the forces against them. All that the Judges or the Army could do was purely reactive–the Judges through the odd statement in court, and the Army through ISPR tweets or a press conference every two months. A concerted campaign cannot be blunted by these tools. The battle was lost the very day Nawaz Sharif began to curse these institutions on G.T Road, and a foot was not put in his mouth. Ceding space to an adversary, no matter how well intentioned, was always going to be a disaster. The spreading demoralization in society, the confusion, and the gathering instability we are now witnessing, is a direct result of this disaster.
And this disaster will snowball out of control if the pace or momentum of accountability, which is slowly coming into focus, is allowed to diminish, or if its credibility is impaired. This will surely happen if this accountability is not to be top to bottom and across the board. The first step in this direction should be to indict Choudhary Qamar Zaman for his crimes, and to rid NAB of his chosen dregs and to keep this institution under constant punctilious Judicial supervision. If NAB has no credibility, what it does will not have any either. It is about time Justice Saqib Nisar and Gen Bajwa met for the sake of our country and war-gamed this issue.
But let me revert to the whispering campaign of political engineering as part of which hundreds are supposed to have been threatened, kidnapped, or disappeared etc but none of those who have been thus treated seems to have had a name or an address. I find these charges largely specious on many grounds. The first is that if hundreds have suffered thus, where are their names and statements?
Secondly if I were Justice Nisar or Gen Bajwa and my aim was to put Imran Khan into the saddle weren’t there much easier ways to do so than the cloak and dagger stuff being alleged? I mean it is a well known and reported fact that on 28 Jul 2017, a very large number of legislators felt constrained to look towards GHQ to get an indication which way to jump. It is also well known that no such indication came.
Would that not have been the easiest way forward?
Or if I wanted to break the back of PPP would Dr Asim Hussain, Uzair Baloch, and Rao Anwar and the loads of evidence hidden away in them not have been enough for my purposes? And similarly, if I wanted to shred PMLN, what was stopping me moving up the Model Town Massacre case, or the case of the 56 fraud companies, or the LNG case? Having all this ready material to crush the heads of the two most poisonous snakes, why would I be resorting to sending my minions to this judge to garner a certain opinion or to that electable to change his loyalties? This just does not make sense.
Make sense or not, immediately after the elections the crushing of heads of these two snakes, and the many snakelings under them should be the first order of business, if Pakistan has to survive. The snakes and Pakistan are antithetical to each other. The survival of the one must mean the death of the other. This at the very least should by now be clear to even the dullest of minds. Taking an in-between position will mean siding with the snakes and pronouncing a death sentence on the state. So, let’s wait and see which way the cookie crumbles.