MicroPakistan

The lawyers’ movement in Pakistan will go down in history as an effort by the legal profession to set the judiciary right and prevent military rulers from using the higher judiciary to supersede the Constitution and make themselves legal. The solidarity within the community was significant and it created some stunning impressions on civil society in general and the political parties in particular.

Sensing that their street protest and district-level mobilisation was creating a new awareness, the lawyers became chary of politicising their movement. But with the passage of time, political parties were forced to look at the movement and the dividends it could yield. The first bait they threw to the lawyers was boycott of the elections. Lawyers responded to it positively since a boycott would have added to the punch they were already packing.

The lawyers saw the boycott as an instrument that forces President Musharraf to relent and let the judges he fired on November 3 come back. But the idea of the boycott cut two ways. It reassured and threatened in equal measure the two parties that mattered in Pakistan. The PMLN liked the idea because it wanted Musharraf out; the PPP did not like it because it was not interested in getting the fired judges back. The PMLN nursed revenge too; the PPP didn’t like the old judges thinking of it as a handmaiden of Musharraf sent as a gift from the US.

The PPP had reason to prefer the new Supreme Court over the old Supreme Court. The new Court vacated the order freezing two sections of the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) 2007 issued by the old Court, thereby allowing beneficiaries of the ordinance to ‘enjoy the fruit of the ordinance’. The law gave protection to people facing cases of corruption brought against them in the period stretching from 1986 to 1999, the period during which the PPP leaders are supposed to have indulged in corruption. Often the granting of a stay is a preliminary expression of the court’s final inclination.

The old Court had also tended to define itself politically when it took on President Musharraf, and its chief justice began to tilt the Court against him. Lal Masjid was an opportunity that it did not miss. Islamabad botched the Operation against the vigilante clerics and aroused enough public reaction against it to allow Justice Chaudhry to ‘reinstate’ the family that had lost control of the seminary complex. The PPP had sided with Musharraf on Lal Masjid together with others like the JUI within the MMA, the ANP and the MQM.

The elections were not boycotted. The PMLN whose boycott would have mattered most to the lawyers also succumbed to the lure of elections. Cleverly, it won in Punjab by using the lawyers’ movement. If the lawyers thought the political parties could help their movement without politicising it, they were to be disillusioned. The PMLN politicised it by leaning on it. As the standoff with Musharraf lingered on, the lawyers began to feel the burden of this politicisation.

The movement began to split on this point. Justice (Retd) Tariq Mehmood who had led the movement in its earlier phase together with others from the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), and who had been under house arrest, chose to separate himself from the SCBA president Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan, protesting politicisation. One may disagree with his stance, but the fact is that the prolongation of the standoff and the rise of the PPP as the biggest winner of votes has brought the political aspects of the movement to the fore.

In Pakistan two concepts are seen in opposition to each other. The opposite of ‘political’ is held to be ‘professional’. If a general is praised as a ‘professional soldier’ it is assumed that he will not sully himself with the political act of overthrowing a civilian government. Lawyers too are professionals and are supposed to stay away from politics to safeguard the reputation of their profession. In history however lawyers have most indulged in politics and have been admired in the textbooks for doing so. Only the judges are supposed to be apolitical. But if the lawyers want equidistance from the two dominant parties it could be because of their unsavoury reputation in governance.

But the SCBA president Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan is a romantic who sees himself at the head of a revolution. He vows that if the dismissed judges are not reinstated, he will lead a Long March on Islamabad that will ’shake the edifice of power’. The revolution has to be a ‘people’s revolution’ and that widens the reference of the legal profession as a part of civil society. Calling the movement political or politicised is pointless; it aspires to the status of a revolution.

Like all “revolutionary” movements, the lawyers’ movement too has used threats, and actual violence, in some cases, to deter fellow-lawyers from ‘disagreeing’. The tone was set early when the SCBA office-holders began threatening the judges of the Supreme Court whom they now want reinstated. They publicly announced that they would burn the Supreme Court down if the verdict was given against them. Respectable lawyers heading the movement stated openly that an adverse judgement would be rejected by them. The judges became ‘good’ only after they delivered a judgement to the liking of the lawyers.

The lawyer and the journalist have collaborated on the public cause. Both are professional and in some ways immune from the acts emanating from the dark underside of the modern state in the third world. One avatar of the police is the evil jinn of ‘thana’ that brutalises innocent but politically wrong citizens. It too walks in fear of lawyers and journalists. Ill-paid journalists are known to take ‘monthlies’ from the ‘thana’ in an unsavoury symbiosis. Lawyers are known to work in tandem with ‘qabza groups’ in the real estate jungle of Pakistan. Banks don’t advance loans to lawyers and journalists (the writer of this article included); houses too are not rented out to these two categories.

The lawyers’ movement is split. That may save us from a revolution and its predictable aftermath. Even if politics wins and the parliament decides to reform the judiciary instead of reinstating the judges of the old Supreme Court, the clout of the legal profession is bound to increase vis-à-vis the magistracy in the districts and judges at the higher judicial level. That too will need reform, but any regulation of the lawyers’ style of functioning will now be a long time coming.

The lawyers have led us to a realisation that all is not well with our judiciary. By supporting the defiant judges they have actually criticised the pliant ones that get into the judicial system only to become the skids on which the dictators roll in and control the state legally. Their movement alas has dwarfed the other, much more serious, crises that confront the state. This incongruity will become more and more emphasised as the ship of the state enters choppy waters and a punch-drunk civil society is distracted by challenges threatening its very survival.

Will the lawyers pass the baton on to the elected parliament or will they man the barricades and carry on the revolution that has not happened? The first option will make them remembered forever as a force that gave us the reform we have needed since we became independent.