Just a few years back if anyone had predicted that I would write this piece, I would have told them they were joking. I believed that the system had been so gamed by the political cum military bosses of the country, that no fearless judge could emerge in the higher judiciary to give relief to the people, or hope to the country.
But I was wrong.
There is much in the negative being said about the judges of the Supreme Court. It is being said they are unduly active; there are far too many suo moto notices being issued by them; and that in cahoots with the army they are involved with political engineering.
Let me dispose off the last observation first. Any honest reader will concede that had a tenth of what is happening in the country today, happened a mere decade back, there would have been an army coup. Coups did nothing for the country in the past, while they brought down the professionalism of the army as also its stock. In short, they were a double whammy. In the present state of absence of government and unrestrained theft of national resources something had to give. The only choice was between an army takeover and “political engineering” by the judiciary in partnership with the army. If neither had been resorted to, the state would have imploded. Thus, if there was a choice, I’d choose “political engineering” any day of the week. My only problem with this is, it has not gone far enough. While the thieves plundered with abandon, those who have volunteered to stop them, are doing so with blushes.
By holding Nawaz Sharif and family accountable, the Court created a major change in popular perception and belief. Before this the average Pakistani could not believe that the rich and powerful could ever be held accountable, except if they should be in political opposition to the powers that be.
For the first time in Pakistan have its people become aware that clean drinking water, health care, education etc etc are their basic rights. And this has happened only because the Judges, led by the C.J, have made them aware of this. Whatever may happen now, no one can take this awareness back.
But perhaps the single most important of the recent S.C judgements is the one concerning nomination forms whereby each prospective candidate for the legislature must now declare his assets and taxes etc in the form of an affidavit. Each declaration made in these affidavits will form either the basis of a charge of perjury, or of data on the basis of which a candidate could be charged with owning wealth disproportionate to his means. In short, this is a tool which, if correctly used, could cleanse the immense dross and dirt which has accumulated on our political system.
For example, if the declarations of a misbegotten Bilawal and his disreputable father were both to be handed over to a forensic accountant, their political careers would end in jail time, with Zardari spending the rest of his life behind bars. With this, the much needed cleansing of Pakistan’s Augean political stables could finally begin, and this beginning will end in hope for the state.
But here lies the problem. Just as there was no executive force to do the bidding of the S.C prior to 01 June 2018–[indeed the executive was sworn to stand against the state and the highest court of the land], there is no one to implement the law consequent to these declaratory affidavits.
This is because the Election Commission is non-functional. If it was at all functional, Dr Fahmida Mirza, who has had Rs 84 crores of bank loans written off [which is common knowledge] would never have dared stand for elections. She only gave in her nomination papers because she had sound grounds to believe that the ECP is neither functional nor effective.
Indeed, if the ECP had either the imagination or the commitment to doing its job it would have realized that the affidavit as ordered by the S.C is the single most important document to be submitted by prospective candidates for election. On the heels of this realization should have come the realization that this document will not mean a thing unless claims made therein can be verified. This would need both time and standard operating procedures [SOPs] to be drawn up. And any fool would know that the most important part of these SOPs should have been that copies of these affidavits be sent to FBR, State Bank, FIA etc to verify their claims on the pain of legal action against these agencies, should they give incorrect verifications. This process cannot be expected to take less than two months, and an ECP concerned with doing its job properly and competently would have been expected to cater for this in working out the deadlines of the election schedule.
But the ECP did nothing of the sort. It is therefore clear that it has no interest in using the said affidavit as a filter to sift the candidates BEFORE the elections, which is the whole purpose of these affidavits. The ECP would much rather allow all these people to fight the elections, and AFTER the polls are held, private citizens of Pakistan would then be expected to go to the courts against those who have perjured themselves in these affidavits. And there these cases would die of old age.
So, affidavits or no affidavits, as far as the ECP is concerned, they’d like it to be the same old story. But a majority of the people of Pakistan would like this to be different this time over. And they’d be looking to their Supreme Court to take cognizance of this glaring flaw between the intent of the law and its implementation and correct the same.
But hidden behind the story of these affidavits is the murky tale of how all this began. And it began with the accursed National Assembly surreptitiously voting out, by an Act of Parliament, the requirement of declaratory nomination forms. That this was done by a thumping unanimity by all members of every political party was a statement of staggering implications i.e that those elected to the legislature were not bound to make any declaration which could disbar them from fighting elections on any ground of immorality!
This was just one step short of declaration by an Act of Parliament that those elected to make laws for the downtrodden, were themselves above any law, and that immunity from accountability for plunder was their right granted to them by virtue of their victory at the hustings!
This is of course how reality has operated in our country. It would have been so much better if this immunity itself were made into a law, so that theft could at least be separated from the hypocrisy that leavens it!
It is therefore for the Supreme Court to see to it that at long last the process of the verification of these affidavits for once acts as the sieve they are designed to be.
Delay in elections is of least concern to a large majority of Pakistanis. What is of real concern is the quality of the people who will emerge triumphant from this process.
And while the Court is at it, let it take suo moto notices of the many crimes the state has been subjected to, and the people witnesses thereto e.g. who was responsible for Ishaq Dar absconding in the plane of the Prime Minister; Ch Qamar Zaman’s deliberate obfuscation of NAB cases reaching their legal and natural conclusion; who are the civil servants that allowed state resources to be used for Nawaz Sharif’s thundering and abusive rallies; why are people like Saad Rafique escaping being charged, and how about Shahbaz Sharif and his 56 companies which were made to harvest the assets of Punjab–why has he not been charged so far, and nor are the many accomplices of Ahad Cheema and Fawad Hassan Fawad; and what of the LNG case in which Pakistan was looted in broad daylight, and though we all know what happened, but the culprits in the case are not being charged etc etc.
At the very least the S.C should instruct NAB to bring charges against such blatant acts of crimes against the state. Once the cases are registered there is always hope that at least some day they will be tried.
This is one hope the Supreme Court can yet fulfill, no matter how weighted down it is by its clear zeal to do right by us.