The decisionby the Peshawar High Court to deny graduation status to a Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal MNA holding a “sanad” from a religious seminary is theoretically fraught with serious consequences. It can potentially pave the way for the disqualification of most MMA wallahs, thereby triggering a grave crisis of democracy. It is curious that the government should have pulled out all the stops to obtain such a judgment – no less than the Attorney General of Pakistan was roped in to do the needful – precisely when the clash between the MMA and General Pervez Musharraf over the LFO was threatening to get out of hand. The MMA, it may be recalled, had already threatened to take to the streets in protest over the way it is being constantly thwarted by General Musharraf over this issue. Now its ire has been fuelled by the PHC judgment because it strikes against the MMA’s parliamentary raison d’etre. Have tensions between General Musharraf and the MMA reached breaking point? Should the PPP and PMLN rejoice in the reopening of political space?
Not at all. A petition has been pending in the Supreme Court of Pakistan against equating a religious degree with an accredited university BA degree. Yet neither the highest court in the land, nor the petitioner, seems in any great hurry to conclude the issue. Nor, strangely enough, did it occur to the PHC to save itself the time and trouble by simply passing on the petition before it to the SC for adjudication. Instead, the PHC suddenly decided to shift into top gear and lay down the law. So we now have a situation in which a high court has swiftly held against the MMA but a much superior court is taking its time on the same issue. The conclusion is obvious enough: the PHC judgment is a warning shot from General Musharraf against the MMA’s bow. It says “Watch it, if one of you can be disqualified, all can be disqualified”.
But, of course, the government is not about to unleash the honourable Attorney General of Pakistan against the MMA in the SC right away. Why should the SC rush to judgment if the ever-pragmatic MMA heeds the PHC warning and behaves itself in and out of parliament? After all, the honourable court has been sitting on a couple of critical petitions, including one against the ISI for political bribery, for many years.
Indeed, we may now expect the honourable courts in all the provinces to forward any new petitions on the issue to the SC so that they can all be clubbed together according to law and kept pending or adjudicated upon as required by the shifting “ground realities”. The courts, it may be noted, have historically been pro-stability, whether in upholding the status quo or helping nudge it in the “right” direction. Therefore no mass disqualification of the “sanad” holding MMA-wallahs is in the offing immediately. In the event, the MMA protest march on Friday (today) may be more about huffing and puffing than about bringing the house down.
Since 9/11, General Musharraf’s sense of timing has much improved. Omar Sheikh, the alleged killer of American journalist Danny Pearl was arrested just before General Musharraf embarked on a foreign trip. A couple of high profile wanted Al Qaeda terrorists were nabbed in Karachi on the eve of another foreign hop. The anti-terrorist court conviction against three Pakistanis was announced on the eve of his meeting with the leaders of the European community last week. And now the PHC judgment comes on the heels of his warning to the MMA, while he was in the USA, that the Hisbah bill endorsing the vice and virtue committee and police will not be tolerated by the federal government. Understandably, therefore, the MMA government in the NWFP has quietly shelved the project for the foreseeable future.
Clearly, General Musharraf is still more comfortable dealing with the shrill but ineffectual MMA devil that he thinks he knows and thinks he can tame than he is doing business with the moderate PPP and/or PMLN which lay claim to be populist parties with the potential to unseat him from power. Indeed, General Musharraf went out of his way during his recent foreign trip to blast both parties and their exiled leaders in front of expatriate Pakistanis and foreigners alike. “These parties take dictation from abroad” he thundered self-righteously, blithely ignoring the fact that he had himself exiled the leaders of these parties to foreign climes in the first place.
This makes the position of the PPP and PMLN rather problematic – witness the cold-blooded arrogance of the federal government in deporting the womenfolk of the Sharifs following the recent anti-Musharraf statements by the Sharif brothers. If these parties ally with the treacherous MMA, they simply play into its hands by forcing General Musharraf to give the mullahs an even larger slice of the power-cake than they currently have. But if they don’t, they enable General Musharraf to consolidate his monopolistic hold over power and sideline them from politics altogether.