LAHORE: The Pakistan politics has taken a dramatic turn as a Supreme Court verdict, declaring former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif ineligible to contest national elections or hold public offices has brought thousands of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) supporters on the streets in protest against the decision which has been widely condemned across Pakistan.
The much controversial ruling by a three member bench of the Musharraf appointed judges of the Supreme Court has already raised fears of a return to the political instability of the 1990s, a decade of confrontation between the Bhutto-led PPP and the Sharif-led PML, which eventually culminated in the 1999 military takeover by General Pervez Musharraf. A showdown between Benazir Bhutto’s widower President Asif Zardari Zardari [who is also the co-chairman of PPP]and twice elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been brewing since August 2008 they had jointly forced former Army Chief cum President Pervez Musharraf to quit as president after an eight year long despotic rule. The apex court’s decision came a week ahead of the elections for the upper house of the Parliament called the Senate.
The Sharif supporters see the Supreme Court as a tool of President Zardari, and Sharif has refused to recognise the legitimacy of a chief justice he regards as a Musharraf appointee. The Supreme Court chief justice Abdul Hameed Dogar was appointed by Pervez Musharraf after he had sacked the then Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry who was creating hurdles in Musharraf’s way to run for the presidency for the second time while retaining the military uniform. Nawaz Sharif has already blamed President Asif Zardari for the disqualification verdict passed, saying he is pulling the strings of the apex court judges. He claimed at a press conference that Zardari had offered them a ‘business deal’ “under which the apex court would have declared the Sharif brothers eligible for contesting elections but in return they would have to support an extension to Chief Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar.”
Although defenders of the Supreme Court in the Zardari government argue on narrow technical and legal grounds in defence of the court’s validation of the Sharif brothers’ disqualification from electoral politics, the fact remains that the grounds for the Sharifs’ disqualification were laid by a dictator and no one with an iota of common sense could accept that Musharraf was trying to uphold the rule of law or some elevated principle of justice by shutting the Sharif brothers out of electoral politics. General Musharraf is now gone from the national scene, a discredited ruler who shredded the constitution and caused much institutional damage, and with him so should have gone his attempts to re-jig national politics on the basis of personal preferences and dislikes.
The immediate effect of the much controversial court decision is the orphaning of the PMLN government in Punjab. The country’s largest province has been placed under Governor’s Rule and a Musharraf appointed Governor Salmaan Taseer will soon ask someone else to show a vote of confidence and form the provincial government. This is despite the fact that the two disqualified leaders are not only leaders of one of the two parties in the country’s bipartisan system but extremely popular in Punjab. It was the popular strength of the Sharifs that persuaded them to reject the Supreme Court and absent themselves from the trial, offering insult to it in their statements.
The people of the Punjab in almost all the big cities and town of the province are already condemning the verdict and casting the first stone in the war that is set to intensify in the coming days. The country’s lawyers’ community which has already announced a long march towards the parliament in the coming weeks to press for the reinstatement of the deposed chief justice, lawyers’ movement, has condemned the Supreme Court as the bogus court that must be removed to bring back the court of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry who was sacked on March 9, 2008 by Musharraf while proclaiming emergency. One can almost say that the Sharifs have extorted the decision from the Court to suit their politics because of their refusal to be flexible vis-à-vis the National Reconciliation Ordinance (which Iftikhar Chaudhry has vowed to knock out) under which Asif Zardari was exonerated from all the corruption cases pending against him and on which Zardar’s very survival rests.
Analysts believe that the proposed Long March by the lawyers’ community will now take on a new meaning and will be much more powerful in the wake of the Sharif brothers’ disqualification. The lawyers might have to reconsider their date of “dharna” (sit in) which Mr Nawaz Sharif wanted put further off from March 16, the day of “dharna” after the start of the march on March 12, to enable the Muslim League (N) rank and file to stage their show of strength from Punjab. Not only will the “dharna” likely be forceful with possibilities of violence, but the districts situated along the Grand Trunk Road are likely to erupt with protest. If the Sharif brothers decide to stage this agitation – Nawaz Sharif had actually warned of this and called upon Punjabis to revolt on the streets – it will have the benefit of a number of crucial factors.
The lawyers are likely to be the most effective exponents of this show of force. Their movement is avowedly peaceful but has declined repeatedly into violence. Many of the lawyers are not just professionals but politically engaged persons who feel strongly about the PPP government that they think is an extension of the Musharraf regime. They will receive support from the parties in the All-Parties Democratic Movement (APDM) that had stood by them by boycotting the 2008 elections. On the other hand, Zardari has decided to join hands with the PML-Q (that was formed by Musharraf) which is led by Chaudhry Pervez Elahi in the National Assembly who had been named by Benazir Bhutto in one of her last letters as her would be assassins. Together with the angry supporters of the PML-N, the aggregate of anti-PPP forces will flex muscle and put the country’s fragile political system to severe test. No less crucial will be the support which the media will likely offer to the “Remove Zardari” movement that is sure to follow.
The Pakistani print and electronic media has been supportive of the lawyers’ movement and supportive of the Sharifs because of their principled politics. Therefore, in the days to come, the PPP government will feel itself being isolated. Although there is no constitutional provision for any mid term election but there is a tradition of military intervention to cut short prolonged anti-government agitation that threatens the security of the state. Many analysts believe that this intervention can eventually force the prime minister to dissolve the parliament and order fresh elections under a neutral caretaker set-up. With al-Qaeda and Taliban linked terrorists uniting against the trio of “Obama-Karzai-Zardari” and letting the Pakistan army off the hook, the PPP government is most likely to face a tough test in the days and weeks to come.
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