The syndrome goes on

ADDRESSING a group of lawyers in Multan on February 1, Mr Raza Hayat Hiraj, minister of state for law and justice, asked why Islamic laws were not enforced in the citizen’s day-to-day life when the country’s Constitution had clearly identified the Quran and Sunnah as the supreme law. On the same day, Dr. Ishrat Husain, governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, told his listeners at another meeting that only the Islamic economic system allowed individuals both independence and equality. We shall return to these observations a little later.

Fairly early in Muslim history, a convention required caliphs, and then kings and sultans, to declare on taking the office or throne their resolve to implement the sharia. Considering that some of them came to power by killing actual or potential rivals — uncles, brothers, nephews, cousins — this declaration may have mitigated the unworthiness of their mode of reaching power and given them a semblance of legitimacy — or so they may have hoped.

The princes made a straightforward bargain with the ulema: they would allow the judges and jurists among them to enforce the sharia on ordinary persons as far as possible, but the ulema would have no jurisdiction over the ruler’s personal conduct or his actions in pursuing and retaining power. Islam and the administration of justice were thus linked to a degree, but Islam and politics remained separate.

In the medieval and early modern periods the people at large in Muslim lands remained unconcerned with the politics of princes. Even the jurists, recognizing the role of force as the arbiter of political struggles, would not question the winner’s legitimacy. But times have changed. Word of the people’s right to have a say in their governance has reached even places where democracy is still only struggling to enter. There can be little doubt that a ruler’s legitimacy is now a matter of considerable interest to most of the politically aware people in Pakistan.

We began our journey through history as a democracy, but a vexing dilemma surfaced along the way. Democracy was not well entrenched in our political culture, but it was nevertheless an influential agent in the formation of our normative values and aspirations. We were not at ease in operating a democratic system, and yet we could not accept autocratic rulers; we could not take them except for short periods of time.

The men who ruled us following independence had been elected to the Constituent Assembly, which also served as our legislature, in the autumn of 1945. Their mandate to govern should have been good until the end of 1950 and the same might have been said of their legitimacy. But as 1950 came and rolled along, these gentlemen gave no indication of their intention to seek a fresh popular mandate in new general elections. A crisis of legitimacy thus intensified with the passage of each year after 1950.

But there was no such crisis in March 1949 when Liaquat Ali Khan, prime minister at the time, sponsored the Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly. One might ask why he did so because, by all accounts, he and most of his high-ranking associates in the ruling party (PML) were secular-minded politicians. Several possible explanations come to mind beyond the fact that organized Islamic groups in the country were pressing the government to show its Islamic credentials.

First, Liaquat Ali Khan’s own political future was not entirely secure. Elected to the Indian Constituent Assembly from East Bengal, where his support base had now eroded, he still had to build a constituency for himself in West Pakistan. Second, as prime minister and as president of the PML he was overworked. Third, his party was falling apart as a result of factional splits, which he was not able to stop or mend. In fact, he allied himself with one of the faction leaders in Punjab (Daultana against Mamdot).

Fourth, he would appear to have had only a cursory understanding of Islamic jurisprudence: speaking for the resolution in the assembly he made the amazing assertion that a non-Muslim could become the head of government in Islamic Pakistan, and that those who said he could not were enemies of Islam! Fifth, apart from being internally incoherent, the Resolution did not concede much of a substantive nature to the ulema.

It assured them that the state would make no law repugnant to the Quran and Sunnah, and that it would enable its Muslim citizens to organize their individual and collective lives according to Islam. It was understood at the time that avoidance of repugnance did not mean complete accord, and that enabling citizens to do something was not the same as forcing them to do it.

The constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973 endorsed the Objectives Resolution and made a few more, essentially symbolic, concessions to the demand for Islamization. The adjective, “Islamic,” was added to the country’s name, an advisery council of Islamic ideology was established (whose exertions to date have been largely unproductive), and a provision requiring both the president and the prime minister to be Muslim was written into the last of these constitutions. The late Mr Bhutto banned the consumption of alcoholic beverages and horse racing and made Friday a public holiday when his legitimacy as prime minister came under stress following the electoral rigging in March 1977. But these measures proved to be of no avail. Ziaul Haq’s legitimacy remained open to serious question throughout the eleven years of his rule. He tried to supply this deficiency by flooding the 1973 Constitution with Islamic provisions, many of them unwanted or impossible to implement. But this exercise did nothing for his legitimacy. Students of Pakistani politics, including some in the Islamic parties, generally regard him as just about the most crooked and pernicious ruler the country has ever had.

Why have concessions to the demand for Islamization not helped the rulers who made them? We as a people have been pulled in opposite directions in this regard. Calling ourselves Muslim, we must profess deference for the sharia even if most of us do not know a whole lot about its content. Nor do many of us also know that much of it relates to each individual’s private, rather than public, concerns. We applaud, and would like to implement, the values and broad principles relevant to public affairs that the sharia enjoins.

We do actually obey many of the injunctions contained in the sharia, but there are others that strike some of us as being out of date or simply impossible to follow. Confronted with the demand that all of the sharia be implemented at once, our inner response, and that of most of our leaders, is that it cannot be done. But the leaders, more than the rest of us, lack the nerve to say so publicly. They resort to subterfuge, make promises they have no intention of keeping, or make symbolic gestures that have no bearing on the actual conduct of public transactions or the quality of our lives.

Regardless of what the courts, invoking the ‘doctrine of necessity’, may hold, the legitimacy of General Pervez Musharraf’s acts in appointing himself president and extending his tenure as the army chief of staff is widely disputed. The legitimacy of Mr Jamali’s government is, likewise, in doubt because it has resulted from elections that are said to have been rigged on an unprecedented scale.

Keeping this context in mind, consider that the Islamic parties in the country, controlling the government in two of our provinces, are calling for further Islamization. Will the general concede their demand in the hope of blunting the issue of his own legitimacy? The traditional strategy of authoritarian rulers, facing challenges to their hold on power, has been to bend further before the ulema. That it has not worked to their lasting advantage does not mean that it has been abandoned. Those who govern us have been singularly inattentive to the lessons of experience. General Musharraf is believed to be a secular-minded person. One would not expect him to be sympathetic to the ulema’s agenda. There is an additional problem weighing upon him and the nation. He has enlisted Pakistan in America’s war against terrorism, and thus endorsed the view that Islamic militants (Al Qaeda, Taliban, and the various “lashkars”) pose an unacceptable threat to the world’s peace and good order, and that they are therefore to be wiped out or suppressed.

The organized ulema and a great many others in Pakistan reject this doctrine and oppose their government’s participation in the American crusade. Many sources, both domestic and foreign, claim also that the opponents include a substantial number of high-ranking officers in the armed forces and their intelligence agencies. It may then be that the government of Pakistan is divided against itself, and the general is caught between a rock and a hard place. It remains to be seen how he will extricate himself. Let us all hope that he will not make promises — to the Americans or to our ulema — that he cannot, and does not intend to, keep.

Spokesmen like Mr Hiraj, the junior law minister, and Dr Ishrat Hussain, the State Bank governor, make the general’s task ever more difficult by issuing ill-considered calls for Islamization. Instead of wondering aloud at a public meeting why Islamic laws were not implemented in Pakistan, Mr Hiraj should have gone and posed this question to Prime Minister Jamali and General Musharraf, and I am sure one or both of them would have ended his state of wonderment. Dr Ishrat Husain should ask himself when, where, and under what circumstances beyond the Prophet’s (pbuh) rule and that of the pious caliphs did a truly Islamic economic system function, allowing the individual both “independence and equality.”

These gentlemen, and others given to excessive speech, should heed Sheikh Sa’di’s admonition: Taa mard sukhan na guftah bashad, aib-o-hunarash nahuftah bashad (a man’s faults, as much as his art, remain hidden until he begins to talk).

E-mail: syed.anwar@attbi.com

Conflict in reforms

THE responsibility for law and order and control over the machinery enforcing it has been historically divided and weak. It was never more divided or weaker than it is now, in the wake of the Police Order of 2002 and Local Government Ordinance issued a year earlier.

In the Act of 1861 which the Order of 2002 has replaced, both the control and responsibility vested in the provincial government and in the districts in the police under the general control and direction of the district magistrate. The inspector-general of police had the magisterial powers throughout the province.

It was a brief and simple statement of an administrative relationship on a subject of highest public importance. The differences that occasionally arose were rooted more in personal attitude than ambiguity in law. Stresses were created as administration came under political pressures of changing regimes. The flaw lay not in the law but in the people administering it. Demolishing a colonial structure was however considered by the military government more glamourous than a painstaking effort to reform the selection and training of the people whose duty it was to enforce the law.

The Police Order and the Local Government Ordinance together form the new system of governance which President Musharraf told the Sindh cabinet the other day had come to stay. So dogmatic is his attachment to the new system that, though dealing with provincial subjects, the two laws have been included in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution among the laws which cannot be “altered, repealed or amended” without the previous sanction of the president.

Yet so widespread has been the criticism and discontent that a day earlier than the President’s address to the Sindh cabinet, the prime minister was persuaded by his partymen to find a solution to the problems the new local government and police systems had created. He was cautious enough to commit no more than to refer the issue back to the National Reconstruction Bureau. The NRB having devised the system would naturally be wary of admitting its weaknesses. The uncertainty and conflict are thus bound to persist for some time to come.

The confusion stems essentially from the complexity of the new police structure and the involvement of the local councils, more particularly of the district nazims, in law and order and other regulatory functions which have traditionally been in the jurisdiction of the provincial government.

The law and order is a provincial subject and control on the police under the repealed Act of 1861 and other relevant laws vested entirely in the provincial government. Even the senior officers belonging to the federal cadres, when deputed to serve in a province, come under the administrative control of the government of the province. The law of 2002 has materially altered that position. The control has now to be shared by the provincial government with the federal government, public safety commissions, complaint and coordination authorities and the district governments.

The new law binds the provincial government to select its inspector-general of police (now to be called provincial police officer — PPO) and the capital city police officer (CCPO), an additional IG, out of panels recommended by the national public safety commission which is headed by the federal interior minister with no representation of the provincial government.

Secondly, under the new local government law, the nazim is authorized to perform law and order functions in the district. In doing that, though he replaces the district magistrate (now defunct), the political leanings of the nazim, when running contrary to the interests of the ruling party, would expose the force to diverse pressures impairing its discipline even though the powers of the nazim are severely circumscribed. He cannot interfere in the administration nor in the investigation or prosecution of crime. He may visit a police station but only to find out whether anyone is unlawfully detained. Quite understandably, the nazims have not been heard of visiting police stations. The nazim-police relationship is yet to find a bearing.

Ideally speaking, the safety commissions can serve as a check on interference in the police command structure but in reality it may increase, for the members of the commissions themselves will also be mostly politicians. A police commander will have to have iron nerves to defy his chief minister relying on the security offered to him by the commission.

Nevertheless, the safety commissions, complaint authorities and ombudsmen need to be given a chance to check political interference in the police command and, in turn, also to check police complicity with the criminals.

However, while the scheme of law itself is somewhat impractical, the will to enforce it also seems to be lacking. Neither the safety commissions nor the complaint authorities have been created though the new law was promulgated more than six months ago. Meanwhile, the arrangement it envisages, is losing its appeal and momentum both. A proof of it turned up the other day when the Sindh home minister complained about the chief minister posting SHOs without his knowledge and consent. Under the Police Order only the district police officer can post or transfer SHOs. The chief minister and home minister are thus treading a territory which belongs to neither.

What, however, makes the ministers and legislators chafe the most is the nazims exercising regulatory powers of the government while they are advised to be content with making policies and laws. The power lies in patronage, not in policy. The lowly nazims are thus seen building up their influence on the helplessness of the mighty ministers.

The resolution of this tussle should be sought not in making the nazim and minister share the regulatory powers but to confine the role of the councils and nazims to local development and civic management. The regulatory powers should continue to vest in the government and, like the police, the other departments should also be protected against political interference. If the safeguard of the commissions works in the police, it should work in the revenue, health, education and all other branches of public service as well.

It is however causing disquiet to see that the powers and funds given to the police are being used to augment the number and privileges only of the upper tiers of the force. The police station remains deprived of resources and brutal in image as ever.

Whatever authority, within police or out of it, an aggrieved citizen might reach through personal exertion or extraneous influence, the help or relief he seeks comes only from the police station. To him it is the SHO who matters. It is the police station which controls crime or connives at it which remains bereft of status, dignity and facilities while the ranks above multiply and swell.

Thirty years ago the Karachi police was headed by a senior superintendent. In the new scheme the city has scores of officials of equal or higher rank. The pivot of the force, who is in charge of a police station, remains in the lowly rank of inspector or sub-inspector, while those with lesser responsibilities hold higher ranks.

The number of police stations is growing but all are under-manned and ill-equipped. In Karachi more than half the total exceeding 100 are in make-shift or encroached buildings. One fourth of that number, better equipped and having mobile units each headed by a superintendent, should be able to deal with crime better at a lesser cost.

In the stress and conflict created by the new local government and policing systems, the fear is that both might degenerate further if the local councils become a rival of the provincial administration and the police stations remain centres of torture and extortion. On that the prime minister should seek advice from sources more knowledgeable and less biased than the NRB.

The only constant of life is change!

WHETHER or not the Iraq war occurs, the United States stands diminished. Gone are the restraints it learned in a bipolar world between World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. Hubris has overtaken the mightiest power on earth. Never before in human history has people’s power prevented a war. We may yet be proved wrong.

Some thirty million people marched on the streets in 300 cities worldwide last weekend to register protest. The pity of it all was that all this was to save a murderous dictator, Saddam Hussein, who gassed to death thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq in the early nineties. Incidentally, not a squeak was heard in Pakistan from our Islamists when this happened. Are the Kurds not Muslims?

Nato, and the European Union (EU) will never be the same again. Russia will likely re-emerge as a world player. Japan may go nuclear. Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms are in classic fault lines — a Pandora’s box may open. The US, in a typical knee-jerk reaction to North Korea’s unilateral declaration of nuclear independence, will be offered negotiations — and rewards. North Korea’s Kim Il Jong will celebrate in pomp many birthdays to come. The lineaments of a new super power bloc is emerging to rival the US ‘Old Europe’ — France, Germany and Russia — old enemies, new friends have thrown down the gauntlet. Paradoxically, the only thing that may lessen the ‘diminishment’ of the United States is to go along with the wisdom of the Security Council powers. The Europeans are saying that Bush and his cronies are chasing shadows in Iraq and are afraid of addressing the real problem: North Korea.

The great melt-down that commenced in 1990 with the unravelling of the Soviet Union is certainly not the ‘End of History’. There can of course be no end to history. What we are likely to see is the restoration of the historic balance of power — nuclear power.

At times in history it is an ordinary individual who becomes the unknowing and unintended catalyst of mega change. The Serb terrorist, Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, then heir apparent to Austro-Hungarian throne, on that fateful day in June 1914, was one such. This set in motion an uncontrollable chain of events. World War I involved practically every nation in Europe; the destitution and deaths in millions during the war led to the communist revolution in Russia. For good or for bad the world was never the same again. The arts of war acquired a new terrifying dimension. Yet, born out of this utter chaos was a veritable revolution in the arts, in architecture, in style, in the sciences and female emancipation. The age of people’s power commenced. It is truly flowering now in the post-industrial world.

Is Osama bin Laden the unlikely contender for the ‘Princip’ prize of the 21st century? 9/11 has set in motion a chain of inexorable events. His voice recently over an Eid video — possibly faked — induced the British government to send troops for the first time to protect Heathrow airport, and the US to declare the second highest alert level to defend its homeland security. These costs to protect western democracies from Islamic terrorism — real or imagined — will be in the billions of dollars. It gives another example of costs. Turkey is demanding $50 billion worth of military and other material to provide bases against Iraq. The US offer is $26 billion so far which includes grants-in-aid and debt write-offs. This offer has been pooh-poohed by the Turkish parliament as being measly. By comparison what Pakistan received in the course of the Afghan war was ‘peanuts’. Apparently, our bargaining skills are very poor as compared to the Turks’.

Is it possible that the US is eventually caught in the ‘Soviet syndrome’ — a mountain of debt in a stagnant economic empire? Are there not similarities between the Iraq situation today and the Soviet Union’s disastrous plunge into Afghanistan in 1979?

It might be instructive to recall the reasons for the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. In a word, hubris. The nasty Hafizullah Amin had acceded to practically every demand, to an overbearing Soviet diktat. Yet Afghanistan was invaded and Amin assassinated by the Soviets. Likewise, the unsavoury Saddam, once a US front man, has yielded to most US demands, and yet invasion is promised unless he strips himself naked.

Hubris now overtakes the Bush Jr “empire” in much the same way it has overtaken most empires since the fall of the Achaemenian empire at the hands of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In this sea of worldwide turbulence what should Pakistan do?

First, to remember that we have no powerful friend or protector today. China vows to protect our integrity provided there is no Islamic adventurism from our side. It has not forgiven us for the Tableeghi missions that penetrated Xinjiang in the ‘90s. Our traditional friend Turkey, notwithstanding its current Islamic colour, is Israel’s military partner which is India’s second largest arms supplier. Iran, which under the ‘non-Islamic’ Shah, was always Pakistan’s friend in need, is no more. Islamic Iran for good measure has offered bases to India in the event of war. The US is a ‘cash and carry’ customer; services being rendered by us will be paid for. Finally, our ‘moneybag’ friend Saudi Arabia is in deep internal trouble. One would have to search far and wide today for a friend of Pakistan in Afghanistan. Our disastrous pro-Taliban policy has alienated practically every Afghan ethnic group, Pakhtoons most of all. We live in an unfriendly neighbourhood.

As a corollary to the above it follows that our projection today should be the reverse of our high profile of the 1980s when we were flush with victory in Afghanistan. This means that the armed lashkars and jihadists of various hues have to be recognized as enemies of the state. It is high time the Riot Act was read to them. Article 256 of the Constitution absolutely prohibits the formation of private armies. There can be only one writ in Pakistan, the majesty of the Basic Law.

As purported state policy in the 1990s jihadism has never been seriously discussed in our civil society, press or the Islamic Ideology Council (is it jihad or not?), Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who between them ruled during the last decade, now claim that they were helpless in facing GHQ and that Afghanistan and Kashmir policies were the ‘patriotic’ preserve of the ISI. Is this not a bit of nonsense? Why did they not declare, ‘Either our Afghan policies are set by the government, or, I resign’? In truth they were willing accomplices in all that happened.

If they did not have the moral courage to assert themselves then, they surely have no right to do so now. Mr. Jamali owes his office to the establishment but this should not prevent him from exerting complete government control on policy formulation vis-a-vis Kashmir, Afghanistan and India. He may consider disbanding the ISI, the source of many of our misfortunes. New (more intelligent) structures of intelligence need to be created.

Why is terrorism a counter-productive weapon? Was Israel not created by Jewish terror against the British? Did Algeria and South Yemen not win independence by reliance on terror against the French and British, respectively? Did the terror of the ‘Shining Path’ not change civil society in Peru? And what of the LTTE terror in Sri Lanka and Maoist terror in Nepal?

The difference between the terror of the freedom struggle in Kashmir of the ‘90s and terror as a weapon in Algeria, Yemen, Peru, Sri Lanka and Nepal is that jihad in Kashmir was not wholly indigenous and had some outside backing. Take the case of the LTTE, it has no backing of any state and is funded and manned entirely by Tamils worldwide.

By contrast the Kashmir jihad lost its moral content when certified sectarian terrorists and plain mercenaries from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Arab lands with arms and funding (partly provided by the ISI), took over the cause of liberating Kashmir. Had the Kashmiris fought like the LTTE, it would have had different moral content.

This, coupled with our support to the Taliban in the recent past, earned us a very bad name. Lets us admit the truth of this and proceed to open a new chapter. If we have damaged the liberation struggle in Kashmir, the Kashmiris are equally to blame. They should never have allowed foreign “jihadists” to fight their battle. Freedom is not a proxy war.

I have argued previously in these columns that the way forward is to declare the Simla Pact of 1972 as an unequal treaty and to take Kashmir back to the Security Council. The day will eventually come when the council will wake up to its responsibility.

The contemporary world is too complicated a place for such simplistic assumptions. Muslim Kosovo and Christian East Timor were liberated in recent years not because they were Muslim or Christrian but people’s power in the West, motivated by the media, created a climate of revulsion against revanchist Serb nationalism and a cruel Indonesian military. Russia’s re-ignited imperialism in Chechnya is a probable next target of western pressure groups.

Are there any lessons for Kashmir? Yes, if the Kashmiris can attract the enormous force of western public opinion, it will be India in the doghouse, not Pakistan. Let the Kashmiris fight their freedom struggle in a manner of their choosing and let us remember the old adage: “The only constant in life is change”.

The writer is a member of the National Assembly.

E-mail: murbr@isb.paknet.com.pk