Qazi Faez Isa, we are told, often walks to the Court, eschewing a car ride. This must be good for his health. And in a convoluted, indirect sort of way, it must be good for all of us too, because our Chief Justice has a routine which improves his health on a daily basis. But the problem arises when it is considered that this may be the only thing good about him. And this is bad for the rest of us. His poor health is about the only relief we see coming to us, because that has a possibility of deteriorating to the extent that we are robbed of his blessed presence.
By the time he completes his walk and plonks himself on his high chair of adjudication, it seems his head is short of oxygen. And the vacuum thus created is filled by ego and a sneering arrogance, and he cannot help blabbering.
He cannot help insulting lawyers and brother judges who hold opinions at variance with his own. Too many lawyers think the better of it than argue in front of him, and routinely excuse themselves. But his ego is obviously too overpowering for him to draw the right conclusion from these protests.
On Nov 1, 2023, he was hearing review petitions against his order of 2017 in the Faizabad Dharna Case. When he became Chief Justice, he moved this case to the top of the roster to be attended to, not because this lack of attention was in any way having a critical effect on the health of the state, but because of his own ego. HIS order had NOT been implemented. HE was now going to take the guilty ones to task. The guilty ones were generals giving directions from behind the curtain. He loathes the generals enough to get into their rib cages. Now that he had the chance, he would do exactly that. But being too much of a coward, instead of getting himself a real live serving general in uniform, he’d make do with dead or retired ones who had shed their attire of immunity.
One amazing thing about this hearing was that often it was not clear to the audience whether it was Tahir ul Qadri’s 2014 Dharna that Qazi was referring to and castigating, or the Faizabad one of 2017? Would it not have been so much better for the people of Pakistan had he dealt with Tahir ul Qadri’s Dharna, the murder of 14 citizens by an act of state terror, and moved to uncover and punish those responsible for this act, than the comparatively inconsequential case which he had decided to bless with attention? But no, he just did not have the courage to go there, and so kept snarling in the wrong direction.
And more than once, during the hearing, he made it a point to declare that in HIS court Gen Zial ul Haq will not be referred to as the President of Pakistan as the latter had violated the constitution to get there. It would have been so much better had he also cast his august gaze on the current state of the constitution and named the ones who had shredded it; and also given his opinion on the status of the current Prime and Chief Ministers and their cabinets, all of whom were clearly holding their farcical portfolios in clear violation of the constitution, having over-stayed their legal limits of office. What of elections in ninety days? And what of enemies of the state like Sikander Sultan Raja and Justice Amir Farooq, both of whom are given to manfully discredit their high offices in the shameful service of uniformed masters who, without any doubt, are lap dogs of foreign overlords?
Is there a trick in Qazi Faez Isa’s judicial toolkit which could have allowed him to take cognizance of the utterly shameful manner in which elements of his own judiciary were deployed to whitewash and present for high office, someone like Nawaz Sharif, a thief of international stature and a convicted felon on the run–a proclaimed offender to boot?
Did the ping pong game between Judge Humayun Dullavar and Justice Amir Farooq escape his notice whereby they were jointly involved in trying to tie up Imran Khan and readying him for judicial slaughter, when even a lay person like me could see that Dullavar had blatantly overridden the process by denying Imran the right to present a defense?
Is he blind to the fact that over 13000 supporters of PTI are in jail; that there is no precedence of throwing its female supporters in jail and of treating them as they are being treated today; that members of this party are routinely abducted and then let off if they give press conferences scripted to bring joy to the high command? Does he not find anything remotely anomalous about the fact that approx. 200 cases stand registered against Imran Khan–a man against whom the entire machinery of the state has been marshalled to prove the theft of an egg, but all they routinely come up with is the hens stolen by Zardari and Nawaz Sharif? And yet it is they who roam the land in freedom and with majesty?
And for Qazi Faez Isa, it was the Faizabad Dharna case which held pivotal importance? Yet all of the above instances, egregious in their enormity, seem to have escaped his attention?
And what of this ” Cypher Case”? What really is this but a judicial farce doing the rounds, feeding a starving population on a joke to which there seems to be no end. In a nutshell this case has to do with a warning issued by Donald Lu of the U.S State Department to our Ambassador in Washington. The essence of this warning was that the Imran Khan government was following policies inimical to the interests of the U.S, and that unless this government was removed by a vote of “No Confidence”, Pakistan could not hope to be rehabilitated in the good graces of the U.S.
As per procedure, our ambassador had this conversation put in code [cypher] and sent it to our foreign office. The foreign office deciphered it, gave it a security classification of “secret” and sent it on to its standard list of recipients i.e the Army Chief, and the D.G ISI, but missed out the Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister.
The man who was supposed to bring the “no confidence” move against Imran’s government to please the Americans was the Leader of the Opposition, Shahbaz Sharif. But as per procedure the leader of the opposition is not a recipient of such a communication. So, for whom was the U.S warning meant, but for the Army Chief and the DG ISI, both of whom had the de facto [but illegal] power to have the parliament push the ‘no confidence’ move through?
This leaves out just Imran Khan, the intended victim of the “no confidence” move. So, if the “cypher” was a “secret” it should be obvious to any judge that it was to be a secret from Imran Khan, and not from those who were to pull off the coup! And so, naturally, the cipher was kept from him, till some patriot apprised him of its existence, and Imran Khan got it over.
So, what really is the government’s case against Imran Khan? That he discovered the “secret” that a foreign power, with the help of some traitors in Pakistan, was moving to overthrow the legally elected government of Pakistan, and that he shared the fact of this treachery with the people of Pakistan? What else was it? Is this not a charge of blatantly upholding the sanctity of a treacherous act, whose secrecy was expected to have been maintained by Imran Khan, the victim of the conspiracy?
Or was this a case of Imran Khan having lost a “secret” document? If so, what was the “secrecy” of this piece of paper beyond giving cover to traitorous conduct against the state? And should not the plumed peacocks who overthrew our government in cahoots with our elected representatives, who do little else but commit theft and scratch themselves in all the wrong places in the time left over, be put behind bars and tried for treason instead?
Is this beyond the mental capacity of any judge in Pakistan to understand? If not, is it not about time that this drama, as ignominious as is this whole sordid exercise itself, be brought to an end?
Qazi sahib would do better to begin thinking deeply over the larger issues afflicting the fate of Pakistan, than bitching and snarling at those his overwrought imagination points out as being guilty of bruising his tender ego.
p.s. Periodically Qazi Faez Isa keeps whispering that his father had a great role to play in the creation of Pakistan. I am not aware of that role. But what I am acutely fearful of is that the son is dismantling the state that Jinnah made, and that he might succeed.