By Rifaat Hamid Ghani
Musharraf’s specific contribution to the toxic cauldron in which Pakistan’s polity stews and bubbles was the imposition of his military will without a declaration of martial law. The visible outcome a bit more than a decade later is a widespread non-perception of any infallibly observed and consistently applicable laws at all. Civil law was clearly treated as of no consequence in the ‘countercoup’ and it died without a whimper. No one heard justly esteemed legal personae renowned as civil rights champions and constitutional experts haranguing military trespass.
The simple fact on the ground was that Nawaz Sharif was using his party’s once popular absolute parliamentary majority (there had been extensive disgust with the presently hallowed Benazir in her second tenure) to make legal nonsense of its origin: The legislature or rather too many of its members were on the verge of legislating the PM’s office repugnant dictatorial political powers. Musharraf averted Sharif’s obtaining these legally by appropriating them for himself unlawfully. Why was the interventionist COAS more representative of popular as well as intellectual sentiment at that juncture than the democratically elected prime minister? Because he blocked the misapplication of Islam in politics that Nawaz Sharif was using to whitewash his proposed 15th Amendment.
The point to be made here is that it is not just a COAS Vs PM tussle our political experiences have familiarised us with, but a religious practice Vs democratic practice choice that is constantly if variously posed us. There is a lingering and misleading assumption that a martial law or fidelity to the supremacy of civil authority choice is mirrored in what we view as an Islamization or parliamentary democracy option. Civil politicians and military dictators have, as demanded by the times, been exponents of either. Continue reading A plague of saviours
