Daunting Challenge ahead for Imran Khan
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
What a bizarre spectacle the Pakistani nation was forced into watching. And that, too, in the Supreme Court of Pakistan, of all the places.
November 28 will go down in Pakistan’s checkered history as a day when Pakistanis held their breath, en masse, kept their fingers crossed with a prayer on their lips that the high-stakes drama then being played out, live, in the apex court would have a finale they could live with.
In the end, the drama ended to the satisfaction—if not entirely to their liking—of those who felt concerned with its denouement and hoped it wouldn’t precipitate another crisis. By now, the Pakistanis have had crises aplenty—too many, to be honest—and may have reached the limit of their endurance and resilience. A benumbed nation has no stomach for one crisis after another that has been its fate for so long.
One shouldn’t be blamed for saying, sardonically, that there was no need, at all, for the grand spectacle that the people were put through as gratuitous witnesses to it. So, they are entitled to ask questions and get answers to them from whoever.
Imran Khan was within his constitutional prerogative as PM of Pakistan when he broke the news to the people that he’d decided to extend the service tenure of Army Chief, Gen. Qamar Bajwa, by another three years. It’s a different matter that—as subsequently transpired during the high-stakes drama in the apex court—there’s no provision in Article 243 of the Constitution, under which PM had exercised his prerogative, for extension of tenure.
That was August 19 when Imran made his decision public, a full three months before the apex court got into action on the issue and decided to put Imran’s govt. in the dock.
There was no stir of excitement, of any kind, when PM shared his decision to extend Gen. Bajwa’s tenure.
No ripples were caused because over the years—decades, in fact—the nation had become used to army chiefs getting their tenure extended as a matter of routine.
The latest example, in living memory of most, is that of Gen Ashfaq Kayani who was given a three-year fresh lease by President Zardari in 2010. None objected to it, no lawyer, in a fit of conscience, went wailing before a court of law and no court, high or low, summoned the then rulers to stand in the dock and explain their rationale, or right, for extending the chief of army staff’s tenure beyond the normal limit.
While democratic and so-called elected leaders may have given tenure extension to their chief of army for reasons they held dear—Zardari, earlier, and Imran, now, used exactly the same logic of continuity of command in circumstances of threat to national security as the alibi for extending the lease of their commander—Bonaprtes of Pakistani history extended their tenures on their own as a matter of right. Generals Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf, both autocrats, had no qualms of conscience or compunction, in staying on for extensive and extended innings at the chief’s wicket.
Ayub Khan, setting an example that remains unique, to date, dispensed with the ‘nuisance’ of retirement altogether, elevated himself to the rank of a Field Marshal, never to retire.
Interestingly, the only army chief, to date, to have retired at the completion of his three-year tenure, was General Raheel Sharif. But he didn’t seek tenure extension because he’d greener pastures to look forward to. His Saudi royal patrons had lined up a cushy, sinecure, job for him to head the-yet-on-paper Islamic ‘force’ of OIC member states, dreamed of by the Saudi potentates ostensibly to combat the menace of terrorism.
So much in a rush was Gen Sharif that he didn’t feel the need, at all, to wait, as rules of service demanded, at least two years before accepting another job—that, too, overseas. But the then laissez-faire regime of an errant Nawaz Sharif raised no eyebrows either on this dereliction or violation of rules. The call of Saudi Arabia was sufficient to hold back, nay quash, any probe.
Imran’s decision in favor of Gen Bajwa would have also gone unquestioned and unchallenged had it not been for an unknown lawyer, belonging to a little heard-of body of lawyers by the name of ‘Jurists Foundation’ filing a petition before the apex court and challenge the decision to extend Gen Bajwa’s tenure.
Lo and behold, the little- known lawyer’s petition was admitted in the apex court. It was at this stage that the high-stakes drama began to the bewilderment of a nation fed up with high-drama. It was kicked off by none other than the honorable CJ of the Supreme Court.
It transpires that the petitioner, subsequently, wanted to withdraw his petition. But the apex court wouldn’t let him. Instead, the honorable CJ, off his own bat, decided to morph it into a Suo Motu case.
Interestingly, it was the first time in his 11 months at the helm of the apex court that CJ Asif Saeed Khosa used his prerogative of Suo Motu. Earlier, when he ascended to the top of the court, last year, he’d chided, indirectly, his predecessor for his liberal and frequent resort to Suo Motu.
Still more interestingly, CJ Khosa himself will be getting out of his august robes of the nation’s top judge in less than a month’s time. So, one might dare ask, what did he find so compelling or captivating in the little-known lawyer’s petition against Gen Bajwa and Imran Khan that he wouldn’t let it go away? Not only that, what forced him to do what he, apparently, disliked: wielding the magic of Suo Motu to rub in his point?
His hackles were raised, apparently, by what IK said, in obvious rage, at a public gathering on the heels of Nawaz Sharif’s court-approved flight to the safety of London, ostensibly, for medical treatment. IK pilloried our justice system for being double-faced and pursuing, blatantly, double standards: one, of molly-coddling the rich and the powerful and another, harsh and severe for the poor and down-trodden. He pleaded with the CJ to fix this broken system and rectify its glaring errors.
But the CJ, while publicly taking up the cudgels with IK, decided to return his compliment in a way that he’d remember for good. Or was it a parting gift (kick?) he wanted to give the PM for daring to question the integrity of the high judiciary. He cautioned Imran not to compare the judiciary under his watch with the pre-2009 judiciary, which had logged many an instance of miscarriage of justice. But wasn’t he, too, a part of that pre-2009 and impugned judiciary?
CJ Khosa’s repartee came swift and pungent. It got into action at a furious pace on November 26, with Gen Bajwa’s retirement due by the end of the day on November 28. Imran’s government was, verily, put through a grinder in those three suspenseful days that could well be matched with a Hitchkock thriller.
Of course, the government added to its own woes by being sloppy and patchy during the entire saga of defending its case before the apex court. It looked like a comedy of errors, from the government, with its functionaries and factotums behaving like amateurs. All the characters involved in the episode, on the government’s side, had their faces smeared with a lot of egg. Their tentative performance not only showed their ineptness but also exposed jarring faults in Imran Khan’s façade of good governance. You can’t expect efficiency from ministers and advisers not fully attuned to the calls of their job portfolios.
In the end, the apex court saved Imran from ultimate humiliation and embarrassment by endorsing Gen Bajwa’s extension in tenure, provisionally, for another six months, not three years as the government desired. It was news to everyone that neither the Constitution nor the Army Act that governs and regulates the service conditions and all other details of armed forces officers and jawans has any mention of a three-year fixed term for the army chief. The three-year tenure was, obviously, decided upon randomly and, over decades of observation and practice, became a convention.
The major proviso, or caveat, in the apex court’s endorsement of Bajwa’s extension, makes it mandatory for the government to clean up its act and legislate, clearly and categorically, on the subject of an army chief’s tenure and service conditions.
In other words, IK has been charged with responsibility to amend the constitutional provision in this regard through an act of parliament. The court couldn’t have thrust a more taxing task on IK, given the precarious state of relationship between him and the so-called ‘combined opposition.’
With no love lost between the ruling PTI and those shady characters sitting on the opposition benches in the parliament, the business of legislating—a primary obligation of parliament—has gone by default over the past 15 months or so that Imran has been in the saddle. The opposition hasn’t lost any opportunity to throw spanners in the ruling party’s work. The latest, risible and ridiculous, saga of Fazalur Rehman’s ‘freedom march’ should suffice to understand to what extent this pack of self-servers, masquerading as guardians of public interest, can stoop to embarrass Imran.
Getting the opposition on board for the kind of legislation mandated by the apex court is going to demand a level of cooperation that the opportunists and mafia dons in the ranks of this ‘combined opposition’ are simply not capable of. More than that, they are sworn to denigrate Imran at every step of the way. How will Imran and his team—whose limitations have been overtly manifested in this saga—square this circle is a question daunting enough to any pundit or tea-leaves reader.
On his own part, too, Imran hasn’t quite earned laurels by being rigid and inflexible to any degree of accommodation with what he regards as a corrupt mafia arrayed against him in the game of thrones. His Himalayan ego has its own calls and limitations. Will he be prepared to pay the price the mafia dons may ask of him in return for cooperation to legislate according to the apex court’s demand? All bets may be off on it.
So, the curtain call of one drama may just be the beginning of another. Never a dull moment, verily, in the ‘Land of the Pure.’ Keep your fingers crossed for more of the same.
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
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