After months of fraudulent wheeling and dealing, the choice of a raft of gutter rats has fallen on Yahya Afridi to be the next Chief Justice of Pakistan. This means that Afridi is expected by those who selected him, whether he succeeds in falling to the level of Qazi Faez Isa or not, to fall very nearly to his level of degraded expectations. So, he should be aware that the most enthusiastic of the government functionaries queueing up to congratulate him, would be having the “lowest” expectations of him. And as for those who knew his father, there is little doubt that they will keenly be trying to observe how far the apple had fallen from the tree, or if it was indeed an apple at all.
Yahya Afridi could not have been elevated for the dubious reasons which are so obvious, had it not been for the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, the most dastardly of Qazi Isa’s many crimes against Pakistan; and this Amendment could not have come about without the most egregious and shameless undermining of the electoral process and vote counting anywhere in the world. These votes could indeed not have been counted thus without the intelligence agencies having given their helping hand to it, and what went on before the count–the kidnapping, the torture, the bribing, and the blackmail used to soften the targets. And to think that every session of the Corps Commanders’ Conference, the Cabinet, the National Assembly, and the Supreme Court [who all collaborated in this supreme fraud which converted a 17-member minority in the legislature into a two-thirds super majority] begins with the sacred words of “Bismillah”!
The famished people of Pakistan, who breathe polluted air and drink water laced with sewerage, saw their hopes rise with judges of the superior judiciary beginning to stand up for the state. It was their hope that soon the representatives they had voted for would be restored to their rightful station, and when that happened, their lot would begin to improve. But with the 26th Amendment bringing the Judiciary under the dripping claws of the establishment, that door has been firmly shut on the hopes of the people of Pakistan.
What happens when the last door is smashed shut on surging hopes and crushes them?
Well, often the pieces of fractured hopes merge to form a sledgehammer that breaks open every door. We do not need to go too far back into history to ferret out such an example. We need to go back only to 1970 when East Pakistan decided that it had had enough of being a colony of the West, and Mujib decided to fight those elections based on his “six points.”
Our Generals thought differently, however. They were quite certain that East Pakistan deserved to remain our colony for some years yet. And so did a great number of West Pakistanis as well, and thus there was no debate on the subject. The consensus among our intelligence agencies was that if the 1970 elections were to be totally fair, they would throw up a fractured legislature, which would leave the army as the centre of power in the country with endless possibilities of manipulation.
This conclusion suited the Generals. And so, for completely nefarious reasons, Pakistan had its only fair elections. Unfortunately, as is the case today, the incompetent assessment of the ISI saw Mujib completely sweep the polls in East Pakistan. This gave him the electoral strength to form a government without coalition partners, and the Bengalis were quite willing to stand and fight for their rights. This situation needed to be put right. The Generals decided that they had no option but to beat back the Bengalis. This they proceeded to do, lost the war which resulted, surrendered, and halved their country.
But the geniuses that they are, they decided to learn no lesson from this. In 1922, on instructions from the US, they decided to betray their country and overthrow its legitimate government. The fundamental differences between 1971 and 2022 were:
-In 1971, half the population of the country was colonized. In 2022, the whole of it was.
-In 1971, half the population was subjected to brutality. In 2022, brutalization of the entire population became the norm, and all one had to do to be subjected to it was to stand up and ask to be given one’s rights.
-In 1971, the army was still the most respected institution among half the population of the country. In 2022, overnight, the army became the most despised institution of the country.
Indeed, even a day before “operation regime change”, no one could have guessed that within a fortnight, it would become so detested.
It became so detested because it took a fortnight for it to begin to stink to high heavens when it handed the state over to the likes of the Zardaris and the Sharifs. The army’s bonding with them could not have taken more than two weeks for the excrement of the latter to rub off on the uniforms of the high command. And there it has remained stuck and festers worse with each passing day. This was no mere exposure of the army. It was exposure that stank.
It is only the genius of the high command which could not smell the stink coming when they handed over Pakistan to such knaves, thieves, scoundrels, and pimps. Even their sweepers should have been able to put them wise on those they chose as the guardians of Pakistan. But of course, they could not have bothered asking.
With all doors shut, it is not difficult to predict which way the country will now be headed, because of the firm historical knowledge that shut doors do not remain so. They are always broken open, and systems based on coercion do not have long lives. One therefore needs only to keep one’s eyes glued to Baluchistan and KP.
Baluchistan has much to be aggrieved about. For years, it has been the worst-run province, and it has been the army that has been running it more directly than it has the other provinces. And because the army believes that things are best run with a stick, Baluchistan is seething with the bereavement it has suffered on account of hundreds of its disappeared youth. To get these back, and to be treated with equity and dignity, it has already slid into the beginnings of civil strife, which will not take too much for this to become a civil war.
But it is KP which will overtake Baluchistan. Pakistan laid the grounds for this as it humiliated the Taliban when Afghanistan was under the heel of the US. The ultimate indignity suffered by the Afghans was when the Musharraf government began selling members of the Taliban into US captivity for five thousand dollars each. A proud people like Afghans are certain to avenge this humiliation, and the people of KP, themselves increasingly demeaned, will help them to do so. We have already had one Jirga in KP in which the Pashtuns laid out their demands. With the situation deteriorating by the day, these demands will be strengthened and become louder. Civil disobedience will graduate into a burgeoning insurgency, which the army will have to put down. And an army lacking the support of its people will have its pants beaten off in the process of doing so. And as the pants fall, so will the people of Pakistan fill the streets of the country against their very own army.
This is where the combined efforts of Bajwa and Asim Munir [ the modern-day Mir Jaffer and Mir Sadiq] and their lesser generals have driven Pakistan. No number of ISPR-fed journalists will succeed in spinning a narrative which can alter this truth. Ours is fast becoming the only army which is galloping headlong towards destroying the country, which it had already halved about half a century ago.
Justice Yahya Afridi will be expected to lend his broad shoulders to keep this decrepit dispensation from hitting the ground. Indeed, his very elevation is proof of this expectation. How much he falls to meet it will determine his rank in our judicial history.
Yet, inbuilt in Justice Afridi’s situation lies the opportunity to break expectations, rise, and immortalize himself. If he has it in him to marshal and harmonize the Supreme Court to give back to the state and its people all that it robbed from them, he will be able to achieve this. The first case he picks up and adjudicates will indicate whether he will stand by the regime or with the state. He may thus write the most important chapter in the chequered history of our judiciary and the country.
Email: saeedakhtarmalik85@gmail.com
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