The 26 th amendment in the Constitution was passed, by clobbering, with tactics that would shame Machiavelli by a long stretch, a two-thirds majority in both Houses of the Parliament. But perfidy and deceit remained in full control of the diabolical shenanigans of the architects and movers-and-shakers of the devious scheme – Image Dawn

 

Defenders or Wreckers?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

It’s sheer coincidence that this column is being written on October 16, which date is etched in Pakistan’s not-so-glorious history as the day Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated.

It was 73 years ago, to date, in 1951, that Liaquat was gunned down, in broad daylight, as he rose to address a public meeting in what was, then, known as Company Bagh (Garden), in the heart of Garrison town, Rawalpindi; thenceforth known as Liaquat Bagh. It was also the venue, 56 years later, of another PM of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

However, there’s no coincidence that Liaquat’s assassination anniversary, this year, is falling in the tumult and furor of those very forces that had planned his murder now desperately trying to snuff out whatever little life is left of Pakistan’s morbidly sick democracy.

Like his mentor Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Liaquat firmly believed in the people of Pakistan being the font of their state. But the denizens of the arcane feudal culture that Pakistan had inherited in its western half had other ideas. It wasn’t only that their feudal estates were a legacy of the British Raj but their mindset, too, was beholden to their colonial masters. They saw themselves as successors to their erstwhile ‘gora’ masters and sought to rule over the new country as a fief that belonged to them by their masters’ bestowed titles and privileges.

It was no coincidence that they found fellow travelers among a class of ambitious military Muslim officers of the now-defunct British Indian Army. They too saw themselves as natural heirs of the Raj and wanted to put their own stamp of authority over the infant state.

One name stands out in that coterie of scheming senior military officers with unbridled lust for power: Major-General Akbar Khan.

Akbar was the senior-most Muslim officer in the British Indian Army at the time of Partition, of 1947. He was the architect of the infamous ‘Rawalpindi ‘Sazish’(Conspiracy) hatched to topple the government of Liaquat. That conspiracy was aborted but the army had tasted political blood. That taste has never lost its flavor for Pakistani Bonapartes. It’s as alive today as it was then, in the infancy of Pakistan.

The notorious Rawalpindi Conspiracy may have been aborted but the conspirators didn’t give up; eventually getting rid of Liaquat, on that fateful day in Rawalpindi. From that moment on, Pakistan’s political system has been a hostage to those whose morbid mindset tells them that they’re the masters of the land, and not the people of Pakistan.

The camaraderie between the feudals—of whatever nomenclature or pedigree—and Bonapartes has endured and flourished, ever since the two, together, torpedoed Pakistan’s piddling democracy in its early years.

The disgraced Major-General Akbar Khan was given a further lease of life by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (ZAB), after he had succeeded, in cahoots with the-then military Bonaparte, General Yahya Khan, in truncating Pakistan, and emerging as an Emperor of Pakistan. ZAB appointed Akbar as ambassador to Czechoslovakia, in Prague.

I was a Director in the Foreign Office, in Islamabad, from August 1974 to December 1977, and witnessed, from close quarters, the rise and fall of ZAB, whose unbridled ambition for power had struck common cause with the Bonapartes of the day and wrecked the Quaid’s united Pakistan.

We, young Directors at the Foreign Office, used to get together, for half-an-hour, for a coffee break. Akbar Khan was on home leave from his embassy in Prague and dropped in at one of our breaks. He was loquacious and boastful about his exploits as a soldier. But he was disdainful about politicians and their ilk, forgetting that he had been given a sinecure job as ambassador by a politician, ZAB. He was proud of his brainwave to seize power from political ‘nincompoops’ and regretted that his bluff had been called.

That mindset, acquired in the infancy of Pakistan, of the men-in-uniform being more Pakistani—and by implication more loyal—than ‘bloody civilians’ has persisted all through the years and decades of Pakistan’s tortuous history.

What’s worse is that ambitious soldiers-of-fortune have had no problem in mining minions and cohorts among the feudal landlords who share that mindset of ‘superiority’ and ‘fidelity’ to the Land of Pakistan. No wonder that every Bonaparte in Pakistan’s painful history—from Ayub to Yahya to Zia to Musharraf—who ascended the throne of absolute power as redeemer and savior has only added a chapter and humiliation, with the unstinted co-operation of traditional—feudal—politicians.

What we see unfolding before our eyes, today, is another episode of the drama scripted when General Ayub Khan imposed the first of Pakistan’s periodic martial laws. But this macabre episode could well translate into an obituary of a democratic order that was never given space to strike roots in an otherwise fertile soil of Pakistan.

The lethal combination of unbridled Bonapartist ambition, to hog political space by force, and an insatiable lust for power, by any means, of feudal politicians for whom political office is a means to lard their own nest, is in full display, today.

The mind-boggling shenanigans of politicians-on-leash—while their military masters are smug in their corridors of power seem, at times, ersatz to many a pundit of the Pakistani scene. These political actors are those rejected, overwhelmingly, by the people of Pakistan in last February’s general elections.

But the people’s verdict was brutally hijacked by the incumbent Bonaparte, and a coterie of like-minded generals who have been keeping the entire military force hostage to their ambitions. As on so many occasions, before, in Pakistan’s history, the Bonaparte has had no problem in enlisting the willing co-operation of that political mafia, of Pakistan’s traditional politicians, whose loyalty to soldiers-of-fortune trumps whatever little attachment they may have to Pakistan.

The daggers to finish off Pakistan’s beleaguered democracy had come out the day the notorious General Qamar Bajwa had conspired with this mafia of power-hungry politicians to topple the elected government of Imran Khan (IK). Asim Munir’s lust for power has plumbed further depths than Bajwa’s. He’s out to wreck the democratic order by defacing the 1973 Constitution of Pakistan, through his diabolical scheme of a package of ‘Constitutional amendments.’

I had stopped writing this column at this stage because I wanted to see what came out of the unholy compact between Bonapartes and their political minions to mold the 1973 Constitution of Pakistan to serve their unbridled ambitions.

Well, what the diabolical alliance of uniform and mufti had set out, two months ago, to wrought on the political landscape of Pakistan has met with success. The uniform-mufti cabal has, finally, managed to literally steamroll their package of what they grandiloquently proclaimed as ‘reforms’ in the Constitution.

The 26 th amendment in the Constitution was passed, by clobbering, with tactics that would shame Machiavelli by a long stretch, a two-thirds majority in both Houses of the Parliament. But perfidy and deceit remained in full control of the diabolical shenanigans of the architects and movers-and-shakers of the devious scheme.

In a fully characteristic, but shameless, manner of pulling their nefarious ploy—by hook or crook—the entire episode of getting the package of so-called ‘reforms’ was enacted in the dark of night. What could be more befitting than passing a black law in the pitch of a dark night?

The package, in essence, is a daring attack on the rampart of the judiciary. It amounts to shackling an independent judiciary and making it subservient to the will or diktat of the Executive, thus imparting a body blow to the separation of power between the pillars of a democratic polity.

The Executive, in the Pakistani context, should read as what goes by, in everyday parlance, as the ‘Establishment.’ The Bonapartes—with their political ambitions knowing no bounds—were smugly confident in a pliant Faez Isa at the top of the judiciary. He did their bidding without a fault. It was he who shackled IK’s PTI by denying it the electoral symbol of the people-familiar cricket bat before the general elections of February, this year.

However, the Bonapartes got the fright of their lives when six judges of the Islamabad High Court went public with their grouse that the Bonapartes and their minions were leaning on them, unabashedly, to influence their court verdicts and tailor them to their whims.

The prospect of an independent-minded judge Mansoor Ali Shah—in line to succeed Isa after his retirement on October 25—known for not bending to any pressure or diktat, spiked the Bonapartes’ fright. Hence their Orwellian plan to clip the wings of the likes of Justice Mansoor Ali Shah and deal a mortal blow to the concept of an independent judiciary.

They used their loyal minions—those traditional politicians rejected by the people of Pakistan but thrust upon them by the Bonapartes hijacking last February’s polls—to do the dirty work of disfiguring the pristine 1973 Constitution. The minions, true to their salt, have delivered as per the whims of their uniformed masters.

The brunt of the assault, under the Establishment-dictated amendments—will be borne by Pakistan’s top judiciary, especially the apex court. The rule of seniority in succession to the head of the Supreme Court has been done away with. Instead, a Parliamentary Committee of 12—eight MNAs and four Senators—will pick one out of the three senior-most judges to become the Chief Justice. The committee’s composition will be decided according to the seats of the parties-in-power and the opposition. In other words, the ruling party will dominate in the selection of CJ.

All this maneuvering and engineering is pegged on keeping Justice Mansoor Ali Shah out of contention. The Bonapartes want a pliable and pliant CJ to act according to their whims.

For all intents and purposes, the 26 th Amendment drops the curtain on an independent judiciary. The saga of the Bonaparte mafia assaulting the two other pillars of a democratic polity, begun in October 1958, by the first Bonaparte, General Ayub Khan, has reached its finale in October 2024.

The community of lawyers of Pakistan has rejected the annoying assault on the fortress of democracy. Will they be prepared to call the bluff, as they did General Pervez Musharraf’s in 2007, remains to be seen.

But the last word on this brazen assault on their democratic rights and liberties should be spoken by the people of Pakistan. In any democratic polity the last chapter of any episode, or saga, is written by the common man. BD has only recently reminded the people of Pakistan of what the people’s power can do and served a model, worth emulating, of how to wrest back their usurped rights and freedoms.

Will the people of Pakistan be willing, or prepared, to do to their dictators and autocrats what the intrepid people of BD did to get rid of their civilian dictator, PM Hasina Wajid? - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)