What’s the Latin for ‘panga lena’?

Of our current prime minister the wicked Husain Haqqani used to say that if an arrow was flying five metres above the ground, there was no stopping him from leaping into the air,to become a willing target. The urge was just too strong; he couldn’t overcome it.
Thus he explained Nawaz Sharif’s last fighting innings, 1997-99, when from one confrontation he went to another – President Leghari, Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, Gen Jahangir Karamat – before plunging to his fall on Oct 12, 1999, after trying to prevent Gen Pervez Musharraf’s plane from landing in Karachi – a move that, history books will forever record, was carried out clumsily and predictably backfired.
In exile to whoever would listen Nawaz Sharif would be at pains to stress that he was a changed man and from bitter experience had learned what there was to learn. As we all know, before plunging to his fall Nawaz Sharif had wanted to become Amir-ul-Momineen, finding democracy and its checks and balances a nuisance. A constitutional amendment was prepared and would have become law but for the outspoken resistance of some members including, if I am not mistaken, Khurshid Kasuri.
The Musharraf coup, in a sense, was thus a godsend. It washed away the impression of failure and turned the would-be Amir-ul-Momineen into the foremost champion of resistance and democracy. As makeovers go, there could have been few shifts as dramatic and startling as this: Gen Ziaul Haq’s foremost political protégé, virtually his anointed successor, becoming a democratic star (and much later a breathless proponent of an independent judiciary). Strange the workings of fate.
But lessons learned? The Musharraf affair has all the hallmarks of that old Olympic routine of leaping into the air and seizing the speeding arrow. Leaving aside constitutionalism for which from among an impressive array of grief-stricken commentators such copious tears are being shed, was this smart politics? Weren’t there other things to do, other problems demanding the government’s attention?
But, no, the temptation beckoned and its appeal was not to be resisted, least of all by that conundrum of higher psychology, the interior minister, who, very hurriedly and on a Sunday no less, announced the Musharraf treason trial…just a day after the sectarian mayhem in Rawalpindi on the 10th of Muharram.
The public could have been forgiven for wanting answers to that complete breakdown of law and order but here the interior minister surprised everyone by pulling this rabbit out of his hat. And sections of the commentariat went wild about the triumph of the constitution and rule of law, and a former military dictator being brought to book for his misdeeds.
If the course of events had been smooth it would have been another matter. But there has been a slight deviation from the script. Even the innocent can see what ultra-sharp observers and politicos are having a hard time understanding: it was an army decision, a decision of the high command, to see to it that Musharraf did not appear before the special court on the appointed day and was driven instead to Rawalpindi and lodged amidst the tightest security in the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology.
Does anyone in his right mind think that the army chief, Gen Raheel Sharif, sought Nawaz Sharif’s permission before this happened? We have the prime minister saying the law must take its course and that Pervez Musharraf like anyone else must also be answerable before the courts. And we have the former army chief whisked away to an army hospital while ostensibly on his way to court. Heart trouble or not, security along the chosen route was already deployed. Talk of the government and the army being on the same page, and this only some days after the change in the army command.
Now it is all very well to say that the law should be the same for everyone. But who is saying this? Some of the biggest bank defaulters and tax evaders in the nation’s history, alleged beneficiaries of ISI money in the 1990 elections…if the law was the same for everyone these worthies would be out of politics for all time and facing serious charges in court. But call it luck or the strange permutations of Pakistani politics, or the glorious incompetence of that other gang of mahatmas, the PPP, and we see the same knights becoming the leading professors of public morality. Again, with the whims of the gods who is to quarrel?
But none of this means the Pakistan Army has become the Salvation Army and would turn the other cheek whatever the provocation. The transition to democracy in 2008 happened because the then army command wanted that to happen. And Musharraf had become a liability, bringing a bad name to the army. So the army pulled back its support and Gen Kayani ensured that ISI and Military Intelligence played no games in the elections. So we had democracy, the same democracy which a year later ensured the return of the deposed judges.
The Nov 3 emergency – the basis of the treason charge against Musharraf – was an essential component of that transition. It was only because of that short emergency, the shortest in Pakistan’s history, that Musharraf took off his uniform and Kayani became army chief (a decision Musharraf came bitterly to regret, but that’s another tale).
If any lessons were learned, if at the table of wisdom anyone had sat, our politicos would have let bygones be bygones and claimed the moral high ground for themselves and saved themselves a needless problem. But the arrow in the sky was not to be resisted and so we have this impasse, a narrow reading of the law saying one thing and realism dictating a different course.
Look at this whole thing from another angle. Against a figure of the past, of no relevance to Pakistan’s present or future, all our gifts for pettifogging constitutionalism are coming to the fore. We talk of the Musharraf trial as if the ghost of military interventionism will be exorcised forever. But against the forces battling not just the state of Pakistan but the very concept of Pakistan, the Taliban, all our great powers of sophistry are bent in only one direction: appeasement. Utterly stern when it comes to Musharraf, utterly full of excuses and sympathy when it comes to the Taliban: these double standards leave us totally unfazed.
If indeed we are to rake over the embers of the past, what about the plane hijacking case? When Nawaz Sharif gave orders for Musharraf’s plane not to be allowed to land at Karachi airport – anywhere but Karachi he said, no matter even if this meant landing in India with the army chief on board – weren’t the lives of the passengers endangered? The judge who sentenced Nawaz Sharif to life imprisonment later became a judge of the Supreme Court. But Nawaz Sharif was pardoned and he flew to exile in Saudi Arabia. If the past is to be revisited why be selective about this exercise?
Meanwhile, who is the state prosecutor in this case? Our friend Akram Sheikh who was not above appearing, and regularly at that, in the Dogar Supreme Court. Indeed, if memory serves, on one occasion before a bench of that court (but without Milord Dogar) he told their lordships that when on the bench they rose to “divinity”.
I suppose this was meant in the context of the dispensation of justice. Even so, Dogar judges as an emblem of divinity is still quite a thought, and testifies to the high level of pragmatism of our learned friend. Happily, Ahmed Raza Kasuri from the opposing side, not to be outdone, is coming into his own. He and Akram Sheikh deserve each other. Let no one say this is a dull republic.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com