Relentless Pursuit of Musharraf
By Riaz Haq
CA
Islamabad High Court's Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui, a former president of the Rawalpindi Bar which openly celebrated Gov Salman Taseer's murder in 2011, revoked Pervez Musharraf's bail that was properly granted earlier by Justice Mushir Alam, a Sindh High Court judge in Karachi.
Any person accused of committing a crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Therefore a person charged with a crime should not be denied freedom unless there is a good reason. It is routine for judges to grant bail when the flight risk is low. Unlike Judge Shaukat Siddiqui, the Karachi judge used these criteria in agreeing to grant bail to Musharraf.
Why did Justice Shaukat Aziz decide to revoke Musharraf's bail? To try and understand what may have motivated him to do this, let's take a look at the judge's background:
1. In 2011 PakTribune reported as follows: "One of the candidates for the (Rawalpindi Bar) president slot, Shaukat Siddiqui, when contacted said he had an engagement in Supreme Court; therefore, he could not come to Rawalpindi. He said every lawyer wanted to become the attorney of Malik Mumtaz; therefore, they gathered at the anti-terrorism court."
2. As an attorney in 2007, Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui represented and helped bail out Maulana Abdul Aziz who was charged in multiple cases in connection with the Lal Masjid standoff.
3. Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui's appointment as Islamabad High Court judge was agreed to by President Zardari only after Supreme Court Justice Khilji Arif threatened to hold the President in contempt.
Clearly, Justice Shaukat Siddiqui is a right-wing judge who is ideologically pre-disposed to act against Musharraf even in a routine bail extension hearing. In fact, key decisions of Pakistan's judiciary continue to show strong bias in favor of Pakistan's right-wing politicians and media.
As Pakistan's right-wing continues to seek to dominate all other branches of government and exact revenge from people they dislike, they need to be aware of new emerging threats against them from the ultra-right groups which completely reject constitutional democracy. These groups are actively campaigning in Pakistan to persuade people not to vote in the upcoming elections. They are organizing meetings, delivering lectures and distributing flyers with the following messages, according to a report:
“Muslims have not been stung merely twice, but countless times by the current system in Pakistan. Each time new faces come through coup or election, the people curse the old faces. However, only after a while, the new faces appear even uglier and more despised than the older faces. The current system is incapable of looking after the affairs of the people and securing the rights that Allah guaranteed humankind, regardless of their race, language, gender or religion.”
“Pakistan's current system is a continuation of the British rule occupation that abolished Islamic rule in the Indian subcontinent in the first place. Even though the Muslims shed their pure blood to establish Pakistan in the name of Islam, it was the British Parliament that created Pakistan’s initial legislation under its Indian Independence Act of 1947.”
“It is democracy, designed by and inherited from the colonialist kufr that separates our ummah from Islam and its ruling system of khilafah, whether in Pakistan, Egypt or Turkey, Tunisia or Indonesia. The claim that yet more elections within this system would bring change of system is a lie made to secure this system from abolition...”
Pakistan's higher judiciary, the politicians and the media are entirely focused on their own narrow interests and settling of old scores with very little attention being paid to good governance. If they continue their business as usual and fail to help solve the people's real problems, it's quite probable that they will see the first-ever bloody coup in Pakistan's history with very negative long-term consequences for everyone in the country.
