Pakistan - Let PTI form the Government

 

'India's Judiciary is at its Weakest'

 

The Acquittal of Nawaz Sharif

 

Is the Indian Judiciary Helpless?

 

Shiv Khera: On Becoming a Leader

 

Are these rumbles of discontent coming together?

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

A PEOPLE’S movement is underway in Israel against its ultra right-wing government. Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to subvert the judiciary’s neutrality, with a selfish aim to kill the criminal cases hanging over his head and that of his colleagues. In quite a few democracies, the judiciary is or has been under assault from the right wing for similar reasons. India is witnessing it in unsubtle ways. Pakistan too has seen political interference with the judiciary at least since the hanging of Bhutto. Then Nawaz Sharif and Gen Musharraf, vicious to each other, took turns to undermine the courts. Pakistan, however, has seen mass movements too that have thrown out military dictators and restored democracy even if intermittently. Where’s that old fire in the belly for India?

Describing the unprecedented attack on India’s democracy starkly at a Cambridge University talk is one thing. Few Indian politicians are capable of speaking with conviction without a teleprompter as Rahul Gandhi recently did before an enlightened audience, while also making plenty of sense. But just as he was holding forth — at a talk called ‘Learning to listen in the 21st century’ — two unrelated landmark events were unfolding in Turkiye and Israel. Was he listening to them too?

The events might send any struggling democratic opposition to the drawing board. In Turkiye, a last-minute collapse of the alliance of six disparate parties, preparing to challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election in May, holds a lesson for any less-than-solid political alliance about possible ambush on the eve of an assured victory. Equally instructive was the opposition’s ability to bury its differences promptly, something that eludes India. The Turkish groups have made compromises with each other so that their common goal to defeat Erdogan remains paramount. There are good chances they would succeed, but even if they don’t, it won’t be for want of giving their best to restore Turkiye’s secular democracy.

However, it was the coming out of Israel’s air force pilots to join the swarming protests against the Netanyahu government that is truly remarkable, and unprecedented. These pilots are usually adept at bombing vulnerable neighbourhoods, including Palestinian quarters. But their taking a stand in defence of democracy offers a lesson to every country with a strong military. There were rumblings in India once. Jaya Prak­ash Narayan, the mass leader opposed Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian patch and called for the army and the police to disobey her, an unusual quest but an utterly democratic call when democracy itself is being murdered. The RSS had supported the JP movement. The boot today is on the other foot. Does the Indian opposition have the conviction to follow in JP’s footsteps to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi? Does it at all feel the dire need to make sacrifices and compromises to rescue and heal the wounded nation?

The Israeli government may or may not succeed in neutralising the supreme court, which it has set out to do. But the masses are out on the streets to act when their nation is in peril. And India cannot exist as a nation without democracy. Secular democracy enshrined in its constitution binds it into a whole.

Rahul Gandhi has evolved as a contender for any challenging job that could help save the Indian republic from its approaching destruction. But he should also have a chat with Prof Amartya Sen perhaps who was quoted recently as saying that Mamata Bannerjee would make a good prime minister. Others have their hats in the ring. Gandhi’s talk in the hallowed portals of Cambridge bonded nicely with his 4,000-kilometre walk recently, from the southern tip of India to what is effectively the garrison area of Jammu and Kashmir. No harm if the walk served as a learning curve for the Gandhi scion, but even better if it were a precursor for a mass upsurge as is happening elsewhere, and which has seen successful outcomes in many Latin American and African states.

Rahul Gandhi spoke about the surveillance, which opposition politicians and journalists among others have been illegally put under. His points about deep-seated corruption, that shows up graphically as crony capitalism, are all well taken. Few can match the feat of mass contact across the country that he displayed recently and his declamation at the world’s premier university. The point is that Cambridge University cannot change the oppressive government in India. Only the Indian opposition can. Rahul Gandhi has the credentials to weld mutually suspicious opposition parties into a force to usher in the needed change.

There’s no dearth of issues to unite the people and the parties. To cite one, call out the BJP-backed ruling alliances in north-eastern states where its supporters assert their right to eat beef. And place it along the two Muslim boys incinerated in a jeep near Delhi by alleged cow vigilantes. The criminality and the hypocrisy of it.

The fascist assault on India’s judiciary is an issue waiting to be taken up for nationwide mobilisation. The assault comes at a time when the new chief justice is one with a mind of his own. Judges have stopped accepting official briefs in sealed envelopes as had become the practice, dodging public scrutiny, say, in the controversial warplanes deal with France. The court has set up a probe into the Adani affair, something unthinkable until recently.

The timing of the vicious criticism of the judiciary is noteworthy. The law minister described the judges as unelected individuals, perhaps implying they were answerable to the elected parliament like any other bureaucrat. This is mischievous. The supreme court set new transparent principles in the appointment of election commissioners. It’s a rap on the knuckles of an unholy system. Could anyone call it a fair election in a secular democracy when people are nefariously polarised and the election commission looks the other way? The questions are best answered by opposition parties, preferably in unison.

Family and other Relations in Indian Judiciary

 

Pakistan: Ironies of Liberation

by Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

Will November prove to be the cruelest month of all? It all depends on the answers to some burning questions. Will the COAS, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, go home on 29th November, 2022, as he has pledged several times, or will some extraordinary development “compel” him to stay on? Will Imran Khan’s long march of thousands end with a whimper or a bang (literally)? Will Imran Khan and Shehbaz Sharif enter into negotiations to end civil strife by setting a mutually acceptable date for the next general elections? What role will the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), Umar Bandial, play in mediating or exacerbating political conflict?


​With less than one month to go, General Bajwa’s departure is clouded by the reluctance of the PDM government to announce his successor. Just as rumours abounded earlier about Imran Khan’s offer of an extension to the COAS in exchange for help in defeating the vote of no-confidence against him launched by the opposition in March – now proven true – it is no secret that the PDM leadership would like to scratch his back in exchange for help in warding off the looming threat from the PTI. Even Imran Khan has suggested that if the PDM government can be packed off this month and caretakers installed, General Bajwa may stay on as COAS until after the elections have returned a new government to office. Thus, despite his avowed “apolitical” stance, if push comes to shove during the PTI’s long march, it is not inconceivable that General Bajwa may be “compelled” to step in, pry apart the two warring sides, knock some sense into them and gain an extension in tenure by virtue of his “good deed”. That would open the door to an early election rather than a late one. Under the circumstances, CJP Bandial might see the wisdom of approving another extension for General Bajwa until a new government is installed after the elections.

​Much will therefore depend on how Imran Khan’s long march pans out in the next week or two. It has begun on a soft note, partly because Imran knows that, after the DGISI’s unprecedented public intervention, the Miltablishment could take off its gloves if he crosses their red lines again, and partly because he is still hoping that the PDM government will succumb to the threat of violence and open the door to negotiations that fulfil his objectives. Both sides are propagating their intent to fight despite admitting pressure to talk.

Significantly, too, both parties are begging CJP Bandial to take their side. Imran Khan wants to march and the PDM government wants to stop him in his tracks. Khan insists his marchers will remain peaceful but Rana Sanaullah, the interior minister, has offered evidence of the PTI’s intentions to incite violence. The CJP says that the PTI has a right to march but notes his power to stop it at any time. Meanwhile, the good judge is exploiting this opportunity to browbeat the government and pack the court with handpicked junior judges. The threat of blocking the acquittal of Maryam Nawaz and outlawing the amended NAB law that has reprieved the top leaders of the PDM has sent the government scurrying for compromise, even to the extent of sacrificing its law minister, Azam Tarar, who was compelled to vote in favour of CJP Bandial’s nominees in the Judicial Commission against the interests of the bar which he has long represented.

Another struggle is manifestly unfolding in the background. At least five top generals are vying for the top slot in the army on November 29th when General Bajwa is scheduled to doff his uniform. If he doesn’t do so because of some extraordinary development, they will all go home before he does. So they have a vested interest in forestalling violent conflict, keeping Imran Khan at bay and showing their chief to the door.

It is a perverse comment on the state of Pakistan that the two institutions that are supposed to be “politically neutral” – the army and the judiciary – have become the most intrusive and controversial. Worse, their heads are flaunting their unaccountable powers and prejudices without restraint.

​The double irony built into the situation should not be lost on us, too.

Even as the army high command is insisting that it has become apolitical and neutral and intends to stay that way in the future, both the PTI and PDM are knocking on its door for salvation. The former is threatening them and the latter is cajoling them. Under the circumstances, the probability is that the generals will not shy away from upholding the “national interest” when the state is threatened by instability and destabilization in the face of financial bankruptcy, as always.

The other irony lies in the nature of the unprecedented popular attack on the army’s political interventionism launched by Imran Khan. In normal circumstances, this would be viewed as a belated but welcome development to strengthen constitutional democracy. Indeed, this is the common thread running through the long struggles of liberals, leftists, democrats, human and women’s rights groups and ethnic/sub-nationalist, religious minorities on the periphery. The problem has arisen because the current struggle for “real liberation” led by the PTI is not aimed at defanging the army to strengthen multi-party constitutional democracy but at sharpening its claws to clamp down on the PTI’s political opponents to entrench populist one party fascism.

Not so long ago, the people of Pakistan passionately backed the Lawyers Movement for Independence of the Judiciary as a veritable “revolution” in the offing. A decade later, we have been lumped with the most unaccountable and politically biased judiciary in history as exemplified by the likes of ex-CJPs Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Saqib Nisar and Asif Khosa. Today, we are in the throes of another such populist upsurge against another repressive state institution that threatens to further enslave us instead of liberating us.

"India is not in a good place"

 

Has Pegasus turned India into a Surveillance State?

 

Bhima Koregaon Arrests - Why no trial after 3 yrs?

 

Has the blackbox of UAPA finally been opened?

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express

Student activists Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Asif Iqbal Tanha outside Tihar prison, after a court ordered their immediate release in the north-east Delhi riots "conspiracy" case, in New Delhi, Thursday, June 17, 2021. (PTI Photo)


The orders passed by Justices Siddharth Mridul and Anup J Bhambhani, granting bail to Asif Tanha, Devangana Kalita, and Natasha Narwal, have opened up the black box of the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) jurisprudence. The UAPA had become the black box of Indian jurisprudence for a number of reasons. First, as the orders note, the definition of “terrorism” in Section 15 of the UAPA is vague, and has been used as a licence to classify all kinds of infractions as terrorist. This order will put more spotlight on how individuals are charged under the provisions of the UAPA.

It requires that the state show why the alleged crimes or infractions should not be dealt with by laws dealing with conventional offences under the IPC or other relevant laws. It also helpfully points out that a simple law-and-order problem in a state should not be equated with a terrorist problem. By making a clear distinction that the former is a state subject, and the latter a Union subject under lists one and two, the order, potentially, also has implications for federalism in matters of law enforcement.

Second, it lays down at least a general standard for when a case might be made for being charged under the UAPA. In particular, this order insists that the allegations made against the accused must be backed up by facts, must pertain to acts undertaken by them as individuals, and must be specifically framed. This goes counter to the recent trend where sometimes chargesheets rely as much on speculation as fact, invoke circumstantial considerations about the broad political context rather than acts committed by individuals, and are framed vaguely.

Third, this order opens up the important issue of bail. The UAPA, broadly interpreted, can be a Kafkaesque law when it comes to bail. It prohibits granting bail if there are reasonable grounds for believing that the prosecution’s case might be prima facie true. The problem with this is that often the prosecution’s version was accepted without serious cross-examination. But the Supreme Court had put the defendants in an even more Catch-22 situation, by effectively prohibiting courts from engaging in a substantial examination of the merits of a case during the bail hearings. This order reiterates the fact that courts still have a lot of room to subject the government’s case to scrutiny even in bail hearings. They can examine, as this order has done, how the law has been applied, and they can even look into evidentiary questions. There is a little bit of a conceptual challenge here, though. The court rightly looked into the nature of the evidence presented by the state in this case, and effectively demolished it. Based on the considerations put forward in these orders, it is difficult to imagine another court being able to uphold the state’s case for prosecution. 

The question is, if a higher court hears a bail hearing, how can its orders be crafted in a way that does not prejudge the outcome of a full-blown trial. In this case, the charges and evidence were patently absurd. It is difficult to see how the court could have come to any other conclusion. But when higher courts hear bail hearings and grant relief based on the demolition of the prosecution’s case, what implications does it have for a full trial? This case gives a good prudential reason for the state not to oppose bail in many circumstances precisely for this reason: Opposing bail opens up the case to greater scrutiny without the context of a full trial. This is an interesting conceptual issue.

This order is also a welcome effort to prevent our civil liberties from being swallowed up by the black hole of state power. The UAPA is also a problematic law because it attacks the presumption of innocence. The Supreme Court is becoming wobbly on as fundamental a right as habeas corpus, the state is construing the expression of thought as a crime, ordinary protest is being suppressed or criminalised, bail is being routinely denied, and the state is actively targeting dissenters. In this context, the reiteration of some common sense principles is very welcome: It provides some relief and hope for constitutional wisdom to prevail. Hopefully, it will empower more judges to do their duty.

But it is premature to be optimistic about the direction of civil liberties in India. It is a matter of great relief that the trial court has finally released the accused. But prior to that, their release was delayed by a day on the grounds that their address had not been verified. If the state could not verify the address of someone they had in their custody for a year, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It is almost as if the authorities decided to enact a parody version of their impunity. But there is no escaping this fact. The order is an indictment of the Delhi Police and its masters in the Ministry of Home Affairs. In any civilised democracy, heads would have rolled. Instead, what we will get is an aggressive appeal by the state. We can only hope the Supreme Court will not let the cause of liberty down again.

We also know that landmark orders often have very little effect on the state or the culture of the judiciary. They sometimes work in high-profile cases. Sometimes they are a reflection of conscientious judges doing their duty as these judges seem to have done. But more often than not, they have been a flash in the pan that allow us to hold on to the illusion that the judiciary will at some point dispense justice. Will this order, by the power of its example, have an implication for the travesty of justice being enacted in the Bhima Koregaon cases, and the fate of Sudha Bharadwaj and Anand Teltumbde? Just yesterday this paper carried the story on the front page of Mohammed Ilyas and Mohammed Irfan, who were acquitted of UAPA-related charges after nine years, seven of which they spent in jail having had four bail applications turned down. It is a reminder that the pathologies of the UAPA are not specific to particular political parties, but were hardwired into the system.

This bail order has opened up the black box of UAPA jurisprudence. It is well reasoned, without histrionics, and full of constitutional common sense. But whether this order will be sufficient to wipe off the recent black marks against the judiciary remains to be seen.

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India: Where does one turn when law, political parties and the state turn their back on justice?

P B Mehta in The Indian Express


Anand Teltumbde, one of India’s important and courageous thinkers, just turned 70 in prison. He, along with Sudha Bharadwaj and others, is being held in the Bhima Koregaon case. They are being repeatedly denied bail. Varavara Rao, poet and Maoist intellectual, contracted COVID and has been subject to degrading and humiliating conditions at the age of 80. The overwhelming power that the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act gives to the state, the sheer impunity with which government can treat this group of accused, the Kafkaesque role of the judiciary in denying bail and making procedural safeguards ineffective, and the deafening political silence on their detention, all warrant deeper reflection. The accused in the Bhima Koregaon case are not the first to be victimised in this way; and they will not be the last. The UAPA is being used to target protest from Assam to Delhi.

Anand Teltumbde’s work, particularly “Republic of Caste”, presciently forecast his own condition. He, like the others, has drawn support from the usual petition-writing crowd of intellectuals. But his case provides a disturbing window on the political loneliness of a genuine intellectual in Indian conditions.

Here is a well-known Dalit intellectual being put in prison and yet no serious political protest, even from Dalit politicians. Teltumbde had, in another context written, “When Sudhir Dhawale, a Dalit activist, was arrested in 2011 on the trumped up charge of being a Naxalite and incarcerated for nearly four years, there was hardly any protest from the community.” This phenomenon of figures like Teltumbde not drawing broader political support requires some reflection. Teltumbde himself, in part, attributed this to divisions amongst Dalits, and their greater faith in the state. But his work points towards a subtler reason.

For all of India’s handwringing, that we need to escape identity politics, there is a great antipathy to anyone who tries to escape it. Teltumbde is one of those rare figures who argued that the Left and liberals failed to take caste seriously, and caste mobilisation failed to take class and economics seriously. But the result is a kind of suspension in between two constructions: Most of society does not get outraged because he is often reduced to being a Dalit intellectual; Dalits don’t get outraged because he becomes a “Left” intellectual. The blunt truth is that, if we leave the rarefied world of petitions, the only modality of protest that is politically effective is the one that has the imprimatur of community mobilisation behind it. If you can show a community identity is affected, all hell will break loose; without it, there is no political protest.

Teltumbde was also prescient about the way the term “Left” is used in India. Teltumbde himself is closer to the Left in his economic imagination. But the rhetorical function of the “Left” in India is not to describe the contest over the free market versus the state. The rhetorical function of the “Left” is to describe any ideological or political current that, while recognising the importance of identity, wants to escape its compulsory or simplistic character; so any broadly liberal position or a position that distances itself from “my community right or wrong” also becomes Left. For Hindutva, anyone who resists or transcends the narcissisms of collective identity becomes “Left.” But the same is increasingly true of other identities — Maratha, Jat, Dalit, Rajput. “Left” is anyone who complicates identity claims. That, rather than secular versus communal, is the big chasm in Indian politics. But the result is that if you are labelled “Left” in this way, you will have no political protection.

The charge of Maoism is the hyper version of this “Left” in the context of Adivasi mobilisation. Which is why the entire political class, and so much of India’s discursive space, keeps invoking the “Left” spectre. And Teltumbde was insightful in thinking that once you had been labelled Left in India, it was easy to secure a diminution in your legal and cultural standing. Even the Courts will turn off their thinking cap. It is in this that the genuine intellectual enterprise is a lonely one, whose disastrous political consequences Teltumbde is facing.

The Bhima Koregaon cases also throw a spotlight on so many state institutions. The UAPA, and its ubiquitous use is a travesty in a liberal democracy. The lawyer, Abhinav Sekhri, has, in a recent article (“How the UAPA is perverting the Idea of Justice”, Article14.com) pointed out two basic issues with the law. The law is designed in a way that it makes the question of innocence or guilt almost irrelevant. It can, in effect, inflict punishment without guilt. The idea that people like Teltumbde or the exemplary Bharadwaj cannot even get bail underscores this point. And second, the safeguards of our criminal justice process work unevenly at the best of times. But in the case of the UAPA, the courts have often, practically, suspended serious scrutiny of the state. What legitimises this conduct of the court is two things: The broader ideological construction of the “Left” as an existential threat. And the impatience of society with procedural safeguards. The UAPA has in some senses become the judicial version of the encounter — where the suspension of the normal meaning of the rule of law is itself seen as a kind of justice.

The state has been going after Varavara Rao for his entire life. He is a complicated figure. He is an extraordinarily powerful poet who made visible the exploitative skeins of Indian society; his poetry, even in translation, cannot fail to move you out of a complacent slumber. He was formidable in consciousness raising. Of this group, his ideological excusing of horrendous Maoist excesses, has been indefensible and disturbing. His moral stance once promoted a deeply meditative critique on the morality of revolutionary violence by Apoorvanand (“‘Our’ Violence Versus ‘Their’ Violence”, Kafila.online).

But the farce that the Indian state is enacting in pursuing Varavara Rao in the Bhima Koregaon prosecutions is proving him correct in two ways. First, in his insistence that what is known as bourgeois law is a sham in its own terms; the rule of law indeed is rule by law. And second, that repression and degradation is indeed the argument of a despotic state. Where does one turn when law, political parties and the state turn their back on justice?

Pakistan's Trials

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

Let’s face it. Whatever some may think of Nawaz Sharif’s omissions and however much others may hate him for his commissions, the fact remains that he has demonstrated the courage of his conviction that the unaccountable Miltablishment has no business interfering in the affairs of an elected government, much less in engineering its rise or fall.

Nawaz has held firm to this conviction since 1993 when he was dismissed from office, restored by the Supreme Court and then compelled to step aside. He met the same fate in 1999 and spent seven years in forced exile. Now he is behind the bars for the same “crime” (he insisted on putting General Pervez Musharraf on trial for treason and demanding an end to the politics of non-state actors in domestic and foreign policy). He could have spent another ten years in exile in the comfort of his luxury flats in London – much like Benazir Bhutto, General Musharraf or Altaf Hussain, closer to home, and Lenin, Khomeini and many others in historical time — and looked after his ailing wife. But he chose instead to return, along with his daughter, and go straight to jail “to honour the sanctity of the ballet box”.

This is an unprecedented political act with far reaching consequences. It has driven a spike in the Punjabi heartland of the Miltablishment and irrevocably degraded the ultimate source of its power and legitimacy. The provinces of Balochistan, Sindh and KP have witnessed outbursts of anti-”Punjabi Miltablishment” sub-nationalism from time to time but this is the first time in 70 years that a sizeable chunk of Punjab is simmering not against the “subversive” parties and leaders of other provinces but against its very own “patriotic” sons of the soil. This is that process whereby the social contract of overly centralized and undemocratic states is rent asunder. In that sense, it is the Miltablishment which is on trial.

Unfortunately, the judiciary, too, is on trial. In a democratic dispensation, it is expected to fulfil three core conditions of existence. First, to provide justice to lay citizens in everyday matters. Second, to uphold the supremacy of parliament. Third, to remain above the political fray as a supremely neutral arbiter between contending parties and institutions. On each count, tragically, it seems amiss. Hundreds of thousands of civil petitioners have been awaiting “insaf” for decades. The apex courts are making laws instead of simply interpreting them. And the mainstream parties and leaders are at the receiving end of the stick while “ladla” sons and militants are getting away with impunity. At some time or the other in the past or present, controversy has dogged one or more judges. But the institution of the judiciary is in the dock of the people today because it is perceived as aiding and abetting the erosion of justice, neutrality and vote-sanctity. In 2007, the “judicial movement for independence” erupted against an arbitrary act by a dictator against a judge. In that historical movement, the PMLN was fully behind the lawyers and judges. The irony in 2018, however, is that the same lawyers and judges are standing on the side of authoritarian forces against the PMLN.

The third “pillar” of the state – Media – is no less on trial. It is expected to “freely” inform the people so that they can make fair and unbiased choices. But it is doing exactly the opposite. A couple of media houses have succumbed to severe arm-twisting and opted to gag themselves; many have meekly submitted to censorship “advice”; most are silent for or blind for material gains. The proliferation of TV channels was meant to be a bulwark against authoritarian or unaccountable forces. But a failing economy and political uncertainty has pitted the channels against one other for the crumbs, which has given a leg up to those on the “right side” of the fence. At any rate, the corporatization of the media by big capitalist interests has served to protect the powerful at the expense of the weak.

Finally, the fourth pillar of the state — Parliament — is about to be stripped of its representative credentials. The castration of the two mainstream parties and their leaders is aimed at empowering one “ladla” leader and his party, a host of militant religious groups and a clutch of opportunist “independents” to storm the citadels of the legislature.

Is all hope lost? Are we collectively fated to be victims of a creeping authoritarian and unaccountable coup by the “pillars” of the state in tandem?

No. Sooner than later, the media and judiciary will begin to crack. Neither can survive by being “pro-government” for long. Every chief justice seeks to make his own mark on history as distinct from his predecessor and no judge can shrug away the weight of popular opinion for long. The electronic and print media, too, cannot allow social media to run away with independent digital news and analysis pegged to financial sources outside Pakistan.

Meanwhile, we, the people, must get ready to suffer.

The Challenges to Justice in India

Pakistan's Extraordinary Times

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times


We live in extraordinary times. There are over 100 TV channels and over 5000 newspapers, magazines and news websites in the country. Yet, on Press Freedom Day, Thursday May 3, the shackles that bind us and the gags that silence us must be recorded.

We cannot comment freely on the machinations of the Miltablishment without being roughed up or “disappeared”. We cannot comment freely on the utterances and decisions of the judges without being jailed for contempt. We cannot comment freely on the motives that drive the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement and other rights-based groups without being berated for anti-state behavior. We cannot comment freely on the “protests” and “dharnas” of militant religious parties and groups without being accused of “blasphemy” and threatened with death. And so on. The price of freedom is costly. There have been over 150 attacks on journalists in the last twelve months, one-third in Islamabad, the seat of the “democratically” elected, pro-media government.

We live in extraordinary times. With less than one month to go in the term of the present government, we still do not know who the interim prime minister and chief ministers will be, or whether general elections will be held on time or whether these will be rigged or free and fair.

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We live in extraordinary times. The “hidden hand” is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, pulling the plug on dissenters. For over four years, the democratically elected PMLN government in Balochistan was alive and kicking. One day, suddenly, it was gone in a puff of smoke, replaced by a motley crew of pro-Miltablishment “representatives”. For over three decades, the MQM was alive and kicking. One day, it was splintered into three groups, each vying for the favours of the Miltablishment. For over two decades, Nawaz Sharif was the President of the PMLN and thrice elected prime minister of Pakistan. One day he was no more for ever. And so on.

We live in extraordinary times. For over five decades, the Peoples Party of the Bhuttos was the main liberal, anti-Miltablishment party in the country. Now, under the Zardaris, it is solidly on the side of the Miltablishment. For over seven decades, the Mulsim League has been the main pro-Miltablishment party of the country. Now, under Nawaz Sharif, it is the main anti-Miltablishment party in Pakistan. Indeed, for long Mr Sharif was the blue-eyed boy of the Miltablishment. Now he is its chief nemesis.

We live in extraordinary times. A massive political engineering exercise is being held today to thwart some parties and politicians and prop up others. Such attempts were made in the past too but always under the umbrella of martial law and PCO judges. What is unprecedented in the current exercise is the bid to achieve the ends of martial law by “other” means. An unaccountable judiciary is the mask behind which lurks the Miltablishment. The judges have taken no new oath. Nor is the order of the day “provisional”.

We live in extraordinary times. The liberal and secular supporters of the PPP are in disarray. Some have sullenly retreated into a damning silence. Many have plonked their hearts in the freezer and are queuing up to vote for Nawaz Sharif because he is the sole anti-establishment leader in the country. A clutch is ever ready to join the ranks of rights-groups protesting “state” highhandedness or injustice, like the PTM. We are in the process of completing the circle that began with the left-wing, anti-establishment, party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and is ending with the right-wing, pro-establishment, party of Imran Khan. The “caring socialist-fascism” of the PPP in the 1970s has morphed into the “uncaring capitalist-fascism” of the PTI today. The middle-class, cheery, internationalist “hopefuls” of yesteryear have been swept aside by the middle-class, angry, nationalist “fearfuls” of today.

We live in extraordinary times. In the first two decades of Pakistan, we stumbled from one civil-military bureaucrat to another without an organic constitution or free and fair elections. In the third decade, we lost half the country because of the political engineering of the first two decades but managed to cobble a democratic constitution in its aftermath. Trouble arose when we violated the constitutional rules of democracy and paid the price of martial law in the fourth decade. In the fifth, we reeled from one engineered election and government to another until we were engulfed by another martial law in the sixth. In the seventh, we wowed to stick together under a Charter of Democracy but joined hands with the Miltablishment to violate the rules of the game. Now, after sacrificing two elected prime ministers at the altar of “justice”, we are back at the game of political engineering in the new decade.

Pakistan is more internally disunited today than ever before. It has more external enemies today than ever before. It is more economically, demographically and environmentally challenged today than ever before. The more it experiments with engineered political change, the worse it becomes. We live in extraordinary times.