The Zardari Presidency: A Skeptic's View

By Abdullah M. Adnan

ccun.org, September 15, 2008

 
Like it or not, Asif Ali Zardari is now president of Pakistan. For his opponents and detractors, the maxim that ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade,’ offers a good advice.
 
Still, while welcoming him in his new position and praying that he may preside over a good time for the country, one cannot escape the series of events that ushered him into the presidency. What hurts is not his ascendancy, but the way he climbed up and landed on top of the hill.
 
That Asif Zardari broke his solemn pledges and promises, no sane person can deny. He backtracked consecutively on the Murree Accord, Bhurban Declaration and Islamabad Agreement about the restoration of the judges whom his military predecessor had sacked unconstitutionally. Then, the method he and his ministers adopted for ‘reappointment’ of some of these judges, succumbing to the pressure from the executive, is void of Constitutional sanction and moral authority. It does not bode well for an independent judiciary. Rather, it would lead to a judiciary that is subservient to the executive. So much for the separation of powers of the pillars of the state!
 
The antics of the likes of Farooq Naek (the redoubtable law minister who lied to his own prime minister about Nawaz’s consent to the reappointment of eight Sindh High Court judges) and Sardar Latif Khosa (the neo-pragmatist attorney general who rivaled Aitzaz and once was hit too in the forehead by the police during a lawyers’ rally in the early days of the movement) amount to stabbing the lawyers’ movement in the back. With wounds inflicted by some from amongst its own ranks, the truly genuine and popular movement is now taking last breaths.
 
While being a PPP leader, Aitzaz is reckoned as an upright man and lawyer. However, his political affiliation was both an asset and an obstacle to the cause he championed. He did not go beyond ‘rallying’ in front of the Presidency for some time on that fateful night in June simply because he could not go against his party boss, prime minister and the interior advisor. Whatever else he may say for failing to stage ‘dharna’ is meant to occupy sound bytes and media space. Many, including Justice (retd) Wajih-ud-Din, differed with him on ‘his’ decision of ‘no sit-in’.
 
The PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif did take an uncompromising stance on the issue of the judges’ restoration to pre-Nov 3, 2007 position, but his party could not play its cards well. He was making right noises, but there were too many sounds to believe. PML-N parliamentary party did not object to the provision in the financial bill about having as much as 29 judges (in order to retain the PCOed if the sacked ones do return). A central leader is in fact said to have proposed this maverick provision in the bill.
 
By deciding to move out of the coalition and play the role of a healthy Opposition, Nawaz Sharif might have taken a good decision, but by fielding Justice (retd) Saeeduzzaman Siddiqui, he sent a wrong message to all and sundry. Even his own party men were not happy with his selection as the party’s presidential candidate. Others viewed that even an urban Nawaz Sharif was playing feudal. He rewarded Justice Siddiqui for ‘personal loyalty’ since his dubious role in 1997 in the coup against the then sitting Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah.
 
Then, Nawaz Sharif could not realize the implications of going for Pervez Musharraf’s impeachment first, and restoration of judges ‘immediately’ later on. Impeaching Musharraf amounted to accepting him as a legitimate president as well as cleared the way for Asif Zardari to fill the vacancy. Zardari opted for impeachment route precisely for these two reasons: he met foreign demands of giving indemnity to Musharraf and got himself into the tall building.
 
Afterwards, it was numbers game only. It was a given that Asif Zardari would be the next president of Pakistan.
 
Against his ‘political victory,’ if the PML-N was really interested in ‘moral victory,’ it could have demonstrated this by picking up Justice Wajih as its presidential candidate. If Justice Siddiqui had not taken oath under the PCO in 2000, Justice Wajih too did the same though he might have become chief justice otherwise. He was also in the forefront of the lawyers’ movement and posed a serious threat to General Muharraf’s bid for ‘legitimate presidency’ by standing against him as the candidate of the legal community in 2007.
 
Why the Jamaat-e-Islami did not propose his name and ask PML-N to nominate him in order to secure its support? After all, it was MMA’s parliamentarians, Senator Prof. Khurshid Ahmad and others, who had seconded and supported Justice Wajih’s candidature in 2007. As for Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman and his Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, the less said the better.
 
That the PPP backtracked on promises and indulged in mere ‘power politics,’ the PML-N flip-flopped too much and the JI forsook Justice Wajih is an indication of the times to come.
 
Alliances are being made and unmade for short-term and vested interests. So the situation will not change with the change of faces. Unless each of Pakistan’s political parties sets its own house in ‘democratic’ order and commits to forming alliances only for the sake of forging national cohesion and unity, the skeptic would remain ‘bewildered’ and estranged from political process.
 
Abdullah M. Adnan is a researcher and political analyst based in Islamabad. abdullahmadnan@hotmail.com.