Adil Najam
The Lawyer’s Long March from Lahore to Islamabad is literally hours away as I write this. Arrests of activists continue and a number have just been arrested in Lahore. As if things were not complicated enough, the unseating of the Shahbaz Sharif government in the Punjab and subsequent political developments have added new fuel of Pakistan’s many political fires.
The Zardari government, already losing some important allies from within its own ranks, has gone all out to make sure that the Long March does not succeed. The Lawyer’s movement and Nawaz Sharif (for rather different reasons) are going all out to make sure that it becomes a game changer. In the next many hours we will begin to get clues about which it will be.
Meanwhile, there can be no better commentary about where we have been and come from on this then these clips from now blocked GEO TV. It shows before and after ‘power’ comments from Farooq Niaq – until recently the PPP’s Law Minister and now Speaker of the Senate (and, therefore, next in line to the Presidency).
Pakistan is not unfamiliar to 2AM speeches, which nearly always tend to be important. If the now nearly official rumors are right, this will be another milestone in Pakistan’s history. Although one still wonders what happens next!
The News is announcing that the PM will soon be announcing the restoration of the judges, including CJ Iftikhar Chaudhry in a 2am speech.
@Bloody civ
NRO was the demand of the PPP , and neither Musharraf nor the army has created this crisis. There was no Musharraf or NRO in the 90’s either, yet we saw the same old confrontational, conspiratorial politics by the same old faces, which have been voted back in by the same old Pakistani awam.
Nobody in Pakistan knows what is democracy or cares two bit about the country. Its just every man for himself.
Aamir, what were Gen. Musharraf and his Corp Commanders thinking of when they extended the same immunity from accountability before law to these same politicians through the NRO? An immunity that the military dictators themselves have always enjoyed and continue to enjoy without the need for any law or constitutional amendment. The “de-stabilization, national paralysis and destruction of property” at the hands of these politicians, created and/or given blanket immunity from the law by the military’s whim, is a result of the military’s repeated devastation of the democratic process. This process is progressive, in the long run (only if allowed to run), as an evolutionary – 2 steps forward 1 step back – process. Now we have the added problem of these military-created politicians looking over their shoulders to the military either in apprehension or in hope, every time they flounder or fail. Neither is good either for democracy or for evolutionary progress, which must be allowed to go interrupted through its failures and blunders. The sorry precedent started by the military in 1958 has meant that both politicians and the military can abdicate responsibility to each other every 10 years. The people losing out every time, remain excluded. Without accountability, no matter how poor, through regular elections, no matter how flawed, will this evolutionary process begin. Except, in our case a further retrogressive step would have to be overcome in the first 25 years, i.e. a precedent will first have to be established beyond doubt that the military will not intervene and interrupt the process, before the democratic evolution can even begin.
@Bloody civ
Pakistan Army and bureaucracy is not creating the mess here, its exactly the same politicians who in the 1990’s wasted an entire decade by being at each other’s throats and conducted long marches and political conspiracies to bring down the govt.
These same politicians have been voted back in by the people of Pakistan, because Pakistanis miraculously believe that leopard can change its spots.
Now enjoy de-stabilization, national paralysis and destruction of property. There is nothing democratic or progressive here.