Sahulatkar vs lifafa

If you speak to a PTI supporter, you will find him convinced that journalists who criticize Imran Khan are ‘lifafa’ journalists who get money for opposing the PTI. Being such passionate supporters of Imran Khan, they honestly cannot see how anyone fair and honest can critique or criticize their leader.

These days we also see PML-N and establishment supporters argue that those judges who rule in favour of Imran Khan must be ‘sahulatkar’ judges. For them, it’s impossible that a judge who gives a judgment they disapprove of is following the law and not favouring the PTI.

As erudite columnist Abbas Nasir wrote a few days ago: “For its part, the establishment feels that the legal cases against the former prime minister are ironclad. The establishment appears to believe that some in the superior courts are not deciding the cases on merit but on the basis of a soft corner for the PTI leader. Some of the judges have said that immense pressure is being brought to bear on them from the security services because their judgements are based on the evidence before them and decided strictly in line with the law and the Constitution, and not what the establishment wants.”

The problem is that those who call journalists lifafas or judges sahulatkars aren’t even willing to consider the possibility that journalists or judges coming to a different conclusion than them can do so sincerely or in good faith. Their thinking doesn’t allow for differing perspectives or grey areas.

Before he became a judge, Justice Babar Sattar wrote a regular column for this newspaper and was an analyst on television. He was a critic of all politicians and never particularly enamoured of Imran Khan. In fact, when he was first nominated by then-IHC Chief Justice Ather Minallah, then-PM Imran Khan had instructed his DG Intelligence Bureau to malign and oppose Justice Sattar. However, this effort to prevent him from becoming a judge did not succeed; many politicians and jurists argued at the time that Justice Babar would be the kind of judge who would rule according to the law and not for political preferences.

When NAB sought to arrest me in a false case during Imran Khan’s rule, it was Justice Athar Minallah who denied my bail application and sent me to jail. And five months later it was again him who accorded me bail. But I have no issues with him, as both times he was following NAB law and Supreme Court precedent. The fault was entirely of a malevolent NAB for making a transparently false case against Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and me and using this unfair law to persecute us.

Impartial judges don’t and shouldn’t have the luxury of deciding cases on their likes or dislikes or whether they privately think a person is guilty or not. They have to rule according to the strength of the case presented to them and the law. Getting a ruling against your wishes doesn’t necessarily make a judge unfair. It may be that the law or the case doesn’t warrant a judgment one seeks.

That doesn’t mean that judges always act within the four corners of the law. Legal scholars agree that the judgment of Chief Justice Munir in Maulvi Tameezuddin Khan’s case, which approved of then-governor general Ghulam Mohammad’s dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1954, was an egregiously selective and wrong application of the law and similarly, as the Supreme Court recently held, the decision that awarded the death penalty to prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a profound miscarriage of justice.

Unfortunately, we have not learned from the past. Many judges seem to continue to make decisions based on their own preferences. In recent years, we have seen from our Supreme Court a decision to disqualify Mian Nawaz Sharif on an invented technicality, a decision to not count legislators’ votes against the wishes of their party leader, essentially ignoring the written text of the constitution and finally a judgment to approve the ECP’s decision to not allow the PTI a symbol when no other party had held internal elections.

Such judgments from the courts obviously don’t inspire confidence in the public. Perhaps that is why even when unbiased judges make fair decisions, the aggrieved party is quick to blame bias and unwilling to introspect and see the weakness of their case.

Psychologists argue that people usually first decide which political leader to support and only later come up with arguments to support that decision. Thus the order is reversed from what we normally believe: that people support a political leader based on arguments they find persuasive. It turns out that people only find those arguments credible that are congruent with their pre-held notions and likes and dislikes.

An example is voters’ selective opposition to corruption – they only see and object to corruption by leaders they oppose.

A PML-N supporter is likely to fixate on Farah Gogi sahiba allegedly taking money for transfers and postings in Punjab. And the expensive diamond ring she supposedly demanded for then-PM’s wife, Bushra Bibi. Or the land transferred to a university trust held by all three of them allegedly in exchange for a direct financial benefit from the government. For supporters of the PML-N, the tape recording revealing the demand for a diamond ring or the transfer of the land and the giving away of financial benefit is proof enough. But PTI supporters won’t focus on this argument.

PTI supporters, on the other hand, focus on multitudes of rumours and stories of alleged corruption in Sindh we have heard for years, rumours that the PPP doesn’t even bother denying anymore. Or they will focus on the presumed inability of the PML-N leadership to produce a money trail for their assets abroad or money remitted back to Pakistan.

To a PTI supporter it is obvious that money remitted from abroad to an employee account is at least tax evasion, if not worse. And to a PML-N supporter, the donation of land and the provision of financial benefit is obviously a corrupt deal.

But can courts decide these cases based on rumours or presumptions? If a recording is presented to the court, a natural first question is: where did the recording come from? Similarly, in the land-transfer-for-financial-benefit case, they still need to see the prosecution establish that the financial benefit was actually given by the beneficiaries of the land transfer in a quid pro quo deal. White-collar crime is never easy to prove.

Our laws and the constitution don’t allow impartial judges the luxury to decide cases based on rumours or stories (however credible), or tape recordings without provenance. They need solid proof. We need to understand that what we may consider morally wrong is not necessarily legally wrong. Therefore, before we are ready to label a judge sahulatkar, we need to ask: was he presented a legally solid case?

In a society as politically polarized as ours, if a judge rules in favour of one political party he is called a sahulatkar and if he rules in favour of another he is called a tout. Why can’t partisans on all sides recognize the possibility of the existence of judges who rule according to the law? They do exist. Justice Babar Sattar is one of them.

Our institutions today are working at cross-purposes. It’s time to lower the temperature and bring harmony to the system. I hope mature people are working behind the scenes to bring about harmony. Our 240 million people deserve no less.

The writer is an economist and a politician. He tweets/posts @MiftahIsmail