The clash between the irresistible judiciary led by CJP Iftikhar Chaudhry and the immovable PPP government led by President Asif Zardari is nearing critical mass. When the big bang happens in the next few weeks, the omnipotent army chief, General Pervez Kayani, will have to step into the fray. The problem is that his intervention is likely to plunge the country into a bigger political crisis than the one it seeks to resolve.
The judges are seemingly bent on “getting Zardari”, come hell or high water. Consider. (1) There are two petitions in the Lahore High Court challenging President Zardari’s right to be President of Pakistan and the Co-Chair of the Peoples Party. By law, since the President is supposed to enjoy constitutional immunity, the court should not have entertained these petitions in the first place. But, it not merely accepted them for hearing in unprecedented haste but also dispatched an immediate notice to Mr Zardari to present his case, notwithstanding the constitutional provision of 60 days notice in such matters. More significantly, the constitution nowhere says the President cannot hold any party political office. Nor does Pakistani boast any tradition of apolitical or neutral Presidents, as in India. Indeed, every Pakistani President to date has been a forceful and interventionist personality. President Iskandar Mirza literally invited General Ayub Khan to seize power in 1958; Presidents General Ayub Khan, General Zia ul Haq and General Pervez Musharraf were coup-makers; President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a bureaucrat hand-picked by General Zia, sacked two democratically elected governments and prime ministers in the early 1990s; President Farooq Leghari was a deputy leader of the PPP but ended up sacking the PPP government in 1996; and President Rafiq Tarar was appointed by Nawaz Sharif in 1998, went on to serve under General Musharraf, signed Mr Sharif’s pardon in 2000 as ordered by General Musharraf (before being sacked), and today sits in the assembly of Muslim Leaguers close to his political benefactor.
(2) The judges insist the PPP government must write to the Swiss authorities and reopen the money-laundering cases against President Zardari. But three Attorney-Generals, the Chairman and the Prosecutor-General of the National Accountability Bureau, and two federal law secretaries have come and gone without scratching the back of the judges or the government. The constitution grants immunity to the President against any criminal charges. The Law Minister, Babar Awan, has said that the letter to the Swiss authorities as demanded by the SC will only be written “over his dead body”! He has been ordered to appear before the SC on May 25, when fireworks are expected to fly. Meanwhile, the PPP has closed ranks around President Zardari. The SC may hold the law minister in contempt and imprison him. But President Zardari is constitutionally empowered to pardon any sentence or conviction, and he has already shown his resolve to take this route in the future by “pardoning” a senior official of the Intelligence Bureau as well as the federal interior minister after they were arbitrarily sentenced for misdemeanours. The prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, is next in the judges’ firing line.
Sooner or later, the buck will stop at General Kayani. When the SC’s orders are defied by the government on the grounds that they are arbitrary, unfair, one sided and smack of victimization rather than justice, the court is bound to call upon the army chief to come to its aid. The last time this happened was in 1998 when the SC headed by Justice Sajjad Ali Shah ordered the army chief, General Jehangir Karamat, to provide protection to the court against mischief-making hooligans of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League. But the army chief stepped aside and deferred the request to the defense ministry, compelling Justice Shah and then President Leghari to quit their posts. This time the CJP will have to ask General Kayani to put a gun (no less) to the head of President Zardari and drag him to the court and then to jail. So we may expect the government to try and pre-empt this by a measure of last resort. It had issued an executive notification last year restoring CJP Chaudhry and his colleagues to the SC. If that particular notification is “withdrawn’ by an equally swift prime ministerial executive order at any time – and there are precedents for withdrawal of notifications – the judges will have to take to the streets again with the powerful opposition and media behind their back amidst ironical demands that “the army should intervene to save democracy and rule of law”!
Consequently, General Kayani is fated to play a key role in Pakistani politics. This is all the more interesting since the issue of granting him a two year extension in service as army chief is hanging fire (he retires in November this year). The defense minister says the army chief has neither asked for an extension, nor does the government intend to give him one. But the defense ministry is simultaneously considering an internal proposal to extend the tenure of the post of the three service chiefs from three to five years. Watch out for the General in the eye of the storm!