The Supreme Court’s judgment on the fate of General Pervez Musharraf will have a profound impact on Pakistan’s future.
If the judges should decide to accord legitimacy to President Musharraf, he will take off his uniform (which is what everyone wants him to do), hold relatively free elections (which is what everyone wants him to do) and enable a merited successor to take over as army chief (which is what everyone wants him to do). This will provide a degree of continuity and stability.
But significant chunks of the media, opposition and civil society would be unhappy. They don’t want continuity of General Musharraf’s key domestic and foreign policies. Indeed, they believe that these policies are domestically divisive “because they are seemingly driven by US agendas in the region” and they are undemocratic because they exclude the PMLN. Hence, the argument goes, the extension of the Musharraf regime in any form is not conducive to stability or democracy. Therefore a pro-Musharraf decision would diminish the SC in their eyes, heighten cynicism, and provoke outrage and possibly protest. In time to come, the SC would come under renewed pressure to awaken, “cleanse” itself of its “sins” and “take on” the executive. Suo motu anti-executive writs would fly all over the place. Instead of a delicate balance of power in a troika, we would have a quartet of countervailing power that would lead to a systemic breakdown of the system.
But if the judges decide to sway with the wind and try to knock out General Musharraf, he will impose martial law, scuttle the court, and reverse the transition to democracy. Pakistan would plunge into an abyss of fear and uncertainty. The domestic political process would be derailed and the international community would become anxious. There would be protests and repression. Elections will have to be rigged or postponed. The judiciary’s new found independence would be replaced with subservience and compliance and civil society would retreat to lick its wounds. But Pakistan is not Myanmar. Sooner rather than later, martial law would have to be removed. That is when General Musharraf and Pakistan would arrive at the beginning and struggle to invent the wheel all over again. Meanwhile, the forces of extremism would rush to fill the vacuum created by the absence of the mainstream moderate forces and the specter of radical Islam would come to haunt the trigger happy international community.
There are no easy solutions. We have been there, done that.
Every civilian period is marked with a crisis of governance and every military era is dogged by lack of legitimacy. When the civilians are ousted by the military, we rejoice because they were corrupt and vile and incompetent and autocratic and nepotistic. We applaud every dictator’s “revolutionary agenda” but tire and turn on him because of our yearning for democracy and freedom. The problem arises because military dictators don’t know when and how to call it quits and we remain infatuated by transformations and intolerant of transitions.
Last year General Musharraf was the most popular man in Pakistan. Today he is the most undesirable element in the country. For ten years, Ms Bhutto was maligned but safe. Now she is reborn and insecure. Last month Nawaz Sharif was courageous for defying General Musharraf. This month he is a loser for being evicted to Saudi Arabia. The SC which took oath under the provisional constitutional order of General Musharraf was a kangaroo court. But the same court has now become a savior of the people. We all loved the US as Pakistan’s greatest benefactor because it wrote off our loans and refurbished our military as a bulwark against hegemonic India. But now we hate it with a passion because it is a crusader against Islam. When Shia-Sunni Islamists bomb each other in our cities or Islamic vigilantes take the law into their own hands, we don’t exhort the government to root out sectarianism or establish the writ of the state. But when Islamic radicals cut the throats of our soldiers in Waziristan or Swat, we curse the state for taking them on and killing “fellow Muslims”.
Our current wish list is remarkable for its naivety and opportunism. We want the Supreme Court rather than the political parties and parliament to determine the fate of our system. Thus we seek to replace the opportunism of our sovereign representatives with the unaccountability of nominated judges. We want an end to violent extremism but we will not allow the state to retain its monopoly over the instruments of violence. We abhor Talibanism but are quick to condone it in large parts of Pakistan. And so on, ad nauseam.
Pakistan’s simmering crisis of democracy, law and constitution will not be resolved by piety, popular outrage, media moralism, judicial activism or political engineering alone. We need collective wisdom, patience and tolerance in charting the way forward. Unfortunately, all these qualities are in short supply. Under the circumstances, if the Supreme Court under CJP Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and the military under General Pervez Musharraf clash, there will be no winners.