Pakistan’s slide from an unhappy to a pitiful state continues unabated. Nothing better encapsulates the situation than, that ours is a country stripped of the rule of law, in which law and order are being enforced through bluster and illegal arm twisting with victims being chosen at random.
The rule of law has been deliberately dismantled to create a rule by lawlessness. And the rule by lawlessness has been ushered in to bring back into power, those who had already despoiled the land and rendered the country bankrupt by merciless theft of its assets and resources. And this “ushering in” has been done by people sworn and oath-bound to defend the country to the last drop of their blood!
Can a more cruel irony be imagined, much less, lived?
Pakistan has always suffered poor governance, which has been continuously deteriorating, but who could have imagined that things would ever reach the present pass?
Pakistan’s High Command and its senior Judiciary have a record of working in tandem to bring our country down. Up to this point, our fortunes had never sunk as low as they did in 1971 when half our country was broken off.
But that was an “achievement” solely to the credit of the High Command. The Judiciary had no direct part to play in it. Yet today, when the remaining half of the country is at stake, the highest in the Judiciary are eagerly reclaiming the ignominy that had passed them by in 1971, and are exacting their pound of flesh from a country they are putting out to die.
Before this, we were used to failure of the law in ordering our lives, but the Constitution, however mangled, had been allowed to limp along. And limping along with it were our slender hopes for a better tomorrow. But today a collection of the country’s highest judges, led by Qazi Faez Isa, have decided to strip the country even of its “limping” constitution.
The Qazi had already made his mark in our judicial history when he “immunized” the culprits in the Hudaibiya Paper Mills case against judicial action. This was the nearest Pakistan had ever come to holding its principal thieves accountable. And then he topped this by holding in his own defense that judges may not be questioned for acquiring more property than their means could justify, though the “common man”, the everyday victim of a judge like Isa, was to be judged by a different order of legality!
These enormous failures of integrity should have adequately exposed Qazi’s stained pedigree, even if no mind was given to the fact that he was the protege of Iftikhar Mohammad Choudhary, the crook whose subtle squint of the eye never allowed one to know exactly what he was looking at. But these egregious frailties of character failed to dismantle the Qazi. He remained a bundle of mysteries and contradictions.
His backers, driven by hope or sheer cussedness, kept insisting that he was a fearless judicial warrior on behalf of the rule of law who would much rather be martyred for the cause of the Constitution than bear it being compromised. But a majority knew him as a petty man, a pious fraud, part petty crook, part hoodlum, given to deception and driven by spite and vengefulness. So, we had to wait for him to ascend to the lonely pinnacle of his profession where the full glare of popular scrutiny would finally unveil him.
And this began on day one of his conduct of business as Chief Justice when TV was called in to cover the proceedings. The total residue of these proceedings which remains in public memory, is the show of sneering and snarling at his brother judges that Qazi Faez Isa put up. He was more a picture of a man expending effort to break the stubbornness of his constipation, than the highest judge of the state conducting solemn judicial business.
Then, instead of addressing the situation brought about by the utter judicial mayhem plaguing the country, he picked up on the Faizabad Dharna case because HIS orders in the case had not been implemented.
His next earthshaking order was that no one would be referred to as “sahib”, or “hafiz” and the word “president” would not be used for Zia ul Haq because he was a usurper. Epoch-making judicial rulings that these no doubt were, but not perhaps in a country whose FIRST democratic credential of having free and fair elections was quivering in the balance.
And then he decided to examine if Bhutto’s was a case of judicial murder or not. And what a huge relief it will be for the public when this is decided!
What he could have been remembered best for, is the conniving sniveling little man he is daily proving himself to be. Imagine, he sits in committee to decide the constitution of the judicial benches in the coming week; verbal agreement is reached and the committee disperses; and the written notification he sends out regarding the constitution of these benches is then found to be at criminal variance with the verbal decision reached! One wonders if ever, a crook as petty as he, has risen to become the Chief Justice of a country!
But in his case, each time he has fallen, he has always found a deeper depth to fall to. This came with the ruling to try civilians in military courts. With this he helped to open the back door to a virtual martial law through the agency of a brother judge. All his life he had it be known about himself, that he would be the last one standing in the cause of the rule of law! And the proof of his courage of conviction came in the when this case came up. He sat this one out so that he did not have to rule on the constitutionality of the monumental issue involved, but had his TOAD on the Supreme Court sit for him instead, and carry the water for him. And the toad, Justice Sardar Tariq Masood, obliged and ruled just the way the High Command would have wanted him to rule!
The judgment in this case is a tool to dispense injustice in the May 9 case, which was Pakistan’s “Reichstag Fire” moment. Indeed, the Qazi should have taken suo moto notice of the happenings of May 9, and asked just ONE question to get at its core motivation: “when you expect an attack on a site, will you redouble the guards there, or will you denude it of all security?”. This the Qazi refrained from doing.
The Supreme Court Judgement of holding valid the trials of civilians in military courts will, from now on, be endlessly invoked to beat down every cry for freedom. This will be remembered as Qazi’s lasting gift to the people of Pakistan.
Always the quintessential hypocrite and given to mendacity, I imagine that if the Qazi has any truck with truth, this must come to him only during the contemplative moments of his visits to the washroom, so that none should find him and the truth together, except when he is in hiding.
What a bundle of snarls and whimperings this petty little man has turned out to be!