Dictatorial legacy: Ayub Khan, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf (from left to right)
Dictatorial legacy: Ayub Khan, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf (from left to right)

A coup by other means?

Behind the new methods and names, could Pakistan’s judicial soap opera be a re-run of the same old thing?
Dictatorial legacy: Ayub Khan, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf (from left to right)
Dictatorial legacy: Ayub Khan, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf (from left to right)

 A coup by any other name would smell as foul, wouldn't it? In a country whose political history is the story of uncountable civilians dethroned by military coups, the question of whether the Supreme Court's ruling to send Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani home was the beginning of the end for another civilian government is not one borne of an over-imaginative or conspiratorial mind. Not here in Pakistan, where unelected forces are always waiting in the wings to 'rescue' Pakistanis from their elected leaders.

This time, however, a democratically elected prime minister has not been sent home for the usual reasons. Transparency International claims Pakistan lost USD 94 billion through corruption, tax evasion and bad governance during the four years of Gilani's tenure, while Gilani's fingerprints seem to be all over at least three of the most high-profile financial scandals hogging the headlines. But the former prime minister was not handed his walking papers for earning the title of 'most corrupt prime minister in Pakistan's history'. Since 2008, when the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) came to power, hundreds have fallen victim to sectarian militant groups around the country, while the numbers for suicide bombings and other incidents of terrorism have only gone up and up. And yet, Gilani wasn't ousted for failing in his fundamental duty to provide citizens with the protection of life and property promised in the constitution. He wasn't ousted for not having any answers, as chief executive of the country, to the question of what Osama bin Laden was doing living for years only a stone's throw away from Pakistan's elite military academy. He wasn't ousted because swathes of Pakistan suffer up to 22 hours of power outages everyday, forcing industries to shut down and pushing rioters to clash with the police and burn properties across the country.

Instead, Gilani was ousted because he refused to send a written request to Swiss authorities asking that they reopen decades-old corruption investigations against his boss, the co-chairperson of the PPP and the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari.

Many Pakistani and most Swiss lawyers agree that at this point, it would be nearly impossible to revive the Swiss cases against Zardari. His constitutional immunity as head of state and Switzerland's statute of limitations – under which Zardari's case expires this year – combine to ensure that the gesture of writing the letter would have been a worthless one.

And yet, this very meaningless letter has pushed Pakistan's judges and leaders into a battle to their deaths, ended up felling one prime minister, and left another, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, living out of a suitcase, waiting for the next Supreme Court ruling to send him home. In the meantime, opposition parties have exploited the crisis to mount pressure on Zardari to call general elections before the government's term expires in March 2013.

In the Turkish bath
There is no doubt that the country's already fragile political system has been jolted. Will the whole system be derailed? Will the Supreme Court's wild pursuit of politicians and the government's intransigence mean that the transition to democracy will come unstuck? What in the world does either the government or the judiciary stand to gain from it all?

In a new Pakistan, where power had devolved from the old centres and the powerful army-led establishment was no longer setting all the rules, there was room for everyone – the media, the judiciary, the civilian leadership – to flex their muscles and stake their claims. In the second coming, you could redefine yourself, be whoever you wanted to be.

The ideal way for the PPP-led government to mark its territory in this brave new world would have been to embark on a mission of good governance and development; to wrest control of security and strategic policy from the generals; to focus on rural areas, which it has always neglected; to pay attention to burgeoning problems in the energy sector; and so on – in essence, to prove that it was a government of the people and for the people. 

But the PPP did not seize that chance. The government seemed resolved to drive itself onto the rocks. It plundered, it looted, it disobeyed, it violated, it prevaricated, it misruled. It did whatever it took to get to the end of its five years as a full-term government and fight for re-election. 

That the PPP decided to take this route had much to do with the personality and the personal philosophy of its man-in-charge, Asif Ali Zardari. "Every superhero, or for that matter, super villain, has a superpower: the president's is that he knows how to bring people down to his level," one of Zardari's closest aides said of him. "Aur app ko pata hai, hamman mein sab he nangay hotay hain." (And you know, everyone is naked in the Turkish bath.)

In the hammam that is Pakistani politics, everything and everyone has a price. Indeed, who wins in a system where everyone is corrupt and only money talks? The one with the most money, of course. And so, some allege, while he still could, the president used all the money in the state kitty to maintain his base, bleed it for votes and buy every constituency politician, general and judge willing to be bought. In Zardari's calculation, it seems this politics of give-and-take is what successful politics meant in a new Pakistan ripe with opportunity.

And when it comes to the Supreme Court, the president is even more a victim of this pop psychology. To a Zardari who never forgives nor forgets, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry – the chief justice of Pakistan, the relentless pursuer of the Swiss case against the president – could only be driven by the spirit of vengeance. The president had, after all, resisted reinstating Chaudhry's as chief justice after Musharraf sacked him, so the chief judge must now have a personal score to settle. In a game where survival was the only goal, giving in was not an option.

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