Civilian coup d’etat!
The PM dropped a quiet bombshell at the fag end of his speech on TV and Radio on March 31, 1997, ostensibly in support of the economic package announced by the Federal Finance Minister earlier in the week. He had decided, in keeping with the wishes of the electorate, to revise the controversial clauses of the Eighth Amendment, in particular Article 58(2)b which gave the President powers to remove the PM for any number of reasons. Since 1988, three different Presidents have used this sword four times, three successfully. The Supreme Court overturned President Ghulam Ishaq’s adventure against Mian Nawaz Sharif, so technically he has never been a dismissed PM. His subsequent resignation was the result of a well planned conspiracy that emasculated the ability of the Federal Government to function. Faced with a situation in which would have set a precedent for the disintegration of the Federal structure, Mian Nawaz Sharif opted to go for fresh elections, little realising that while he had managed to knock out one group of conspirators led by President Ishaq (and including the Chief Minister of NWFP, Punjab and Sindh), another group led jointly by the then Chief of General Staff (CGS) and the then DG ISI had more or less the same agenda for his ouster, more dangerously they had the capability to stage-manage a favourable electoral end-result for their Collaborator-in-Chief Ms Benazir Bhutto.
The whole nation is immersed in euphoria over the discarding of the Eighth Amendment, giving little heed to the fact that had it not been for that (now) discarded piece of legislation, we would have still been under the despotic rule of the likes of Zardari, his cronies and collaborators. Furthermore had it not been for Article 112 (2-B), governing the discretion of the President in appointing the Services Chiefs, we would have had the likes of Intriguer-in-Chief Javed Ashraf Qazi as Chief of Army Staff rather than the professional we have now. On the other hand this is the same President who in 1994 appointed Mansurul Haq as Chief of Naval Staff, a living symbol of corruption remaining ‘alive and well’ in the Armed Forces. While the downside of checks and balances is there, the Prime Minister does happen to be the executive head of government answerable to his cabinet, to Parliament and through Parliament to the people. On balance it is he who should have the authority along with the responsibility rather than giving the sole discretion to one person, the President, to make such critical appointments. Similarly it is fitting that the Governors be appointed under the advice of the PM and that they have no powers to dissolve the Assemblies on their own.
The ongoing euphoria about the ‘political revolution’, to quote BBC, has obscured the fact that the fine balance between democracy and dictatorship has now been obliterated. We can very well now have a dictatorial PM without any check and/or balance. If you are of the autocratic bent of Benazir Bhutto you do not need a mandate like the one Mian Nawaz Sharif has to act like monarch. She just kept appeasing people, her political uncles to ensure political peace by giving them some plums and her husband to ensure domestic peace by allowing him to rule the country in name, word and deed. Theodora, the Slave Empress, did not have a similar hold of Justinian as does Zardari over Benazir. So what is the guarantee that such a situation could not happen again? As a nation we tend to go to extremes, lurching from one high to another, without really game-planning the consequences. While the President did the right thing by the nation on Nov 5, 1996 and followed it by having free and fair elections on Feb 3, 1997 as mandated (and promised) 90 days later, the forcing down the throat of a Senate seat for his nephew and the insisting of Friend-in-Chief Shahid Hamid as the Punjab Governor was followed by the ‘imperial’ address to both Houses of Parliament on March 26, 1997 when he seemed to really take on the role of a super-President, exactly what Ms Benazir has been accusing him of for the past four months, as a first step to making a Presidential form of government. The rumours of Presidential interference in almost all issues was running riot in the capital for the past month. The Prime Minister could not continue to function in this manner, when the power-base was seemingly somewhere else. Bureaucracy has a field day in obduracy in such ambiguous circumstances. In the end, the only way for democracy to function was to clip the powers of an increasingly autocratic President, this was duly done. To that end, the PM needs to be congratulated. One also would caution him not to get carried away and make the same mistakes that Leghari did since he tasted absolute power during the Caretaker Period and uptil March 23, 1997.
Now that there is no check and balance in the system and a political crisis does come about, there is always the fear that without the Eighth Amendment as a buffer, the military will be more inclined to take over to ‘save the country’. Article 58(2)b was an instrument designed to keep the military away, its growing misuse is partly what led to the formation of a Council of Defence and National Security (CDNS). We have it on the authority of Mr Khalid Anwar, the legal Supremo, that the CDNS is no more a reality. If that is so then we are in really serious trouble. In most Muslim countries, the military continues to have a say, even in westernised, secular, democratic ones like Turkey. There are always ‘Bonapartists’ among generals, it need not be the Chief of Army Staff but could be some people down the pecking order who have sneaked into or are about to sneak into higher rank. Their combined ambitions, when things start to unravel politically, can always sway even the most reluctant COAS. Without a forum like the CDNS to air one’s reservations without it becoming a conspiracy, there will now not be any check to a military coup. While the controversial clauses of the Eighth Amendment needed to be re-defined, the deletion of clause 58(2)b in toto may come to haunt us later. We may well then choke on today’s euphoria.
One always thought that when the Supreme Court held President Ishaq to be wrong in dismissing Mian Nawaz Sharif as PM, there should have been automatic censure for President Ishaq to resign for ‘bearing false witness’. While controversial clause 58(2)b certainly needed to go, it could have been re-framed with provision for automatic reference to the Supreme Court as to the reasons and if the Supreme Court gave a judgement in favour of the PM (as was done in the case of Mian Nawaz Sharif), then it should have meant the automatic dismissal of the President if he did not resign his office immediately. That possibility would make any President think twice about taking a step. While everyone and his uncle is presently over the moon because of the unanimity in the repeal of the offending clauses, one cannot but shudder to think what might have been if Clause 58(2)b did not exist on Nov 5, 1996.
Asif Zardari would have been stuck in our throats for the next few decades, horses and all!
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