Take, for instance, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). The last time the head of an election commission tried to assert his independence vis-Ã -vis an ever ascendant Supreme Court was in 2011-2012 but, riding the crest of media popularity, the judges were still able to have their way, ordering the election officials to come up with revised electoral rolls within weeks even when it meant bypassing constitutional procedures. Chief Election Commissioner Fakhruddin G Ebrahim, meanwhile, has surrendered the independence of the ECP before the apex court without so much as a murmur. When the government wrote a letter to the ECP immediately after it had issued the schedule for the presidential elections, Ebrahimâs subordinates were firm that this was a matter on which they would not budge but then hastened to add that they could crawl if the Supreme Court ordered them to walk on changing the schedule. What has resulted from such omnipresence and omnipotence of the Supreme Court among state institutions is a democracy which is definitely not presidential as it was under Musharraf but at the same time is also not parliamentary with trifurcation of powers between parliament, the judiciary and the executive. It is a quasi-democratic setup in which a group of unelected judges enjoy a veto over everything that the executive and parliament do. If this is in reaction to what happened to the judges during Pervez Musharrafâs military regime, they seem to be punishing those very politicians who stood by them during their hour of trial. If the current hyper-activism on the part of the court is a case of compensating for letting Musharraf become the head of the state and the government while still being in the military uniform, it is clearly overkill. Regardless of the reasons for this power shift, its implications have been immense. Many constitutional concepts â including international immunity for heads of the state and the government â have either been redefined or done away with; the scope of fundamental rights now extends to national security (as in the memo case) and religious affairs (as in the lone hearing and subsequent decision over the schedule for the presidential election); and the tenets of natural justice have been recreated by the court openly becoming a party in investigating many corruption cases by appointing officers of its own choice to prosecute the accused and by starting trials at the top of the judiciary rather than working as the court of ultimate appeal. If nothing else, the apex court having become the arbiter of the first and last resort in all issues concerning state and society is sharpening existing political divides and creating new ones as well. The opposition and the government donât see eye-to-eye on most political, economic and even constitutional issues but the court has left no proverbial stone unturned to make it clear whose side it is on, creating the possibility of destabilising political agitation in the coming months. If the president of the republic is to be the symbol of the federal nature of the state then the only sensible way of going about electing him would be a non-confrontational, non-controversial one. Disregarding all other opinions and letting religious reasons be the only ground for rescheduling the presidential election is a dangerous reassertion of a national ideology that has harmed the state and society like nothing else. The political class, the intelligentsia and civil society can ignore all these developments and possibilities only at their own peril â as some sections of the polity have already found out since 2009.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 18:09:53 +0000
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