What Is It with the Senate and the Apex Court of Pakistan?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

But before anything else, let’s put the spotlight on PM Imran Khan’s official visit to Sri Lanka.

As these lines are being written, IK is in Colombo for a two-day visit to Sri Lanka, his first as PM. But one is compelled to ask the question why is he there? What is he doing there, other than to stomach one humiliation after another?

The visit to Colombo may have been planned weeks, if not months, in advance as most official visits of Pakistani leaders—and for that matter leaders of all countries in the world—to capitals abroad are under diplomatic convention and protocol.

However, the Sri Lankan government, of late, has been behaving quite undiplomatically and perversely in the context of playing host to IK.

First, only days before the visit was due to commence on February 23, IK’s proposed address to the Sri Lankan parliament was cancelled. No reason was given for this abrupt cancellation for this affront. It was, to say the least, an affront to take out of his planned visit to the tiny Lanka a feature of such importance. Which, quickly, spawned a torrent of speculation why it was done so close to the visit.

The only logical explanation for the Sri Lankans daring to heap such a calculated insult on the leader of a ‘friendly’ country could be their fear of annoying the fascist Modi regime in India whose enmity to Pakistan has long been crystal clear. Nothing would give a better ego massage to Modi than the Pakistani PM so humiliated at the hands of his hosts in Sri Lanka. The pro-Indian lobby in Sri Lanka has been in over-drive against Pakistan ever since Modi and his bunch of Hindutva radical Pakistan-haters have come to power. The partisans of India must be gloating that their shenanigans have paid off so handsomely.

But still more was in store for IK, in the line of humiliation, as he descended on Colombo. Soon after, his hosts also called off his pre-planned meeting with Muslim members of Sri Lankan Parliament. The reason for this surprise cancellation is even more absurd; ‘security concerns’ is the official excuse for not letting IK confab with Muslim leaders of Sri Lanka.

The real reason is that IK’s hosts, in power in the country, have been pursuing a deliberate policy of kowtowing to Buddhist extremists’ Islamophobia. This extremist strain is to such an extent that Sri Lankan Muslims dying of Covid-19 are being regularly cremated. Pleas of Muslim leaders to allow burial of the dead have been falling on deaf ears. As a sop to IK, his Sri Lankan counterpart promised Muslim leaders, days before his arrival in Colombo, to allow burial of their dead according to Islamic rites. However, no sooner that IK was in Colombo than Sri Lankan government reiterated that the policy of cremating all COVID dead will go on as before!

The question is why IK is still in Colombo? The answer is not just his naivete but utter insouciance of our Foreign Office and the man flying the Pakistani flag in Colombo. Apparently, both have been sleeping on their job.

IK may have thought of his Colombo visit as a good opportunity to get away from the overcharged and overheated political ambience of Islamabad at this juncture.

The upcoming election, on March 3, to fill half of the seats in the Senate of Pakistan has snowballed into a political maelstrom. The debate between IK and his adversaries—on whether balloting in the election should be open or, as up to now, secret—has degenerated into much worse than a shouting match.

The framers of the 1973 Constitution conceived of an upper house of the Parliament to, ostensibly, balance out the demographic inequities of the Pakistani federation. The Senate was supposed to be a stabilising factor to ensure healthy legislating regime. However, with ZAB, the most devious politician in Pakistan’s tortuous history at the head of the whole business, transparency was conspicuous by its absence, ZAB had engineered Pakistan’s dismemberment because he wanted to rule it for life. His idea of democracy was one of controlled democracy. As such, a Senate indirectly elected could always be open to manipulation and skullduggery. A system of secret balloting in the senate election would come in handy to manipulate its members elected opaquely. The nearly half-century track record of the Senate elections is there to testify that it hasn’t disappointed its framers.

Imran Khan, imbued with a crusading zeal to clean up the mess, is determined to weed out the corrupting element of opaque election. The recent presidential ordinance, substituting open election for the Senate instead of secret balloting is his desperate bid to implement part of his agenda for a ‘new’ Pakistan. It’s a tall order that he has saddled himself with, given the Augean Stables that the Senate, in particular has become over the decades since its genesis with rampant horse-trading being the ongoing game.

Political suspense in Islamabad is getting thicker by the day. D-Day for Senate elections is March 3, a week away, at best. However, the apex court of Pakistan is still debating the pros and cons of the presidential ordinance since it has landed in the court’s lap in response to a reference filed against it by opponents of Imran’s open-vote initiative.

The lightening brigade against open voting is being led, not surprisingly, by Imran’s political rivals, from PML-N and PPP. Which is another addition to the litany of Pakistan’s corruption-ridden political parties conveniently suffering from short memories and habitually dishonouring their own commitments.

When Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto were hibernating in self-exile abroad, they had ostentatiously agreed to the so-called Charter of Democracy, in 2006, which, among other things, tethered both to open elections for the Senate. But once back into the leadership saddle, both haemorrhaged and went back on what they had committed to. Now, the off-springs of Nawaz and BB are the leading lights of the opposition to open voting for the Senate.

The apex court is, seemingly, dragging its feet on the Senate voting issue because its honourable judges are into a tug of war of their own. Every student of Pakistan’s history is conscious of the roller-coaster ride of their country’s top judiciary. The track record has as many downs as ups. However, the kind of in-fighting and tussle for one-upmanship currently being witnessed is unprecedented. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court did something quite out of ordinary—unprecedented, in fact—when he ordered the ‘removal’ of Justice Faez Isa, from any court reference or litigation in which PM Imran Khan was involved.

The plot has thickened in the wake of Justice Isa challenging the CJ’s arbitrary order and taking his complaint to the media, making it public to all and sundry. However, he isn’t the first to involve the media in this in-house wrangling. The die for it was cast by the CJ himself when he—according to Justice Isa’s repartee—made his restraining order against the judge public before the aggrieved party heard of it.

The ham-handed welcome of IK by the Sri Lankan government must add to the woes of every Pakistani already witnessing the melodrama being enacted in the august apex court of their country. Honourable and esteemed judges of Pakistan’s top-most court behaving like bully boys of club football must pain and grieve their countrymen already ruing their jaded politicians’ shenanigans and petty squabbles.

But, as the saying goes, a country’s foreign relations are a reflection of whatever may be going on domestically. In this day and age of instant communications, it’s next to impossible for any country to make itself invisible. Sri Lanka, no specimen of tranquility or harmony by any stretch of imagination, may well have taken heart from Pakistan’s premium institutions and pillars of state making a laughing stock of themselves, to meet out such a flimsy treatment to their Pakistan guest. No nation should expect others to take it seriously, or respect it, if it doesn’t have the basic notion of what self-respect is all about. -K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)