MONSUN nummer 2 (Bilaga till SYDASIEN nr 4/1999)

Syed Talat Hussain

A high-stakes game

Islamabad 13 november 1999
A political game of high stakes has started with the registration of an FIR (First Information Report on a crime) against former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his allies in an Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) on charges as serious as hijacking and attempted murder. By framing these charges and by pressing them in an ATC, the new set-up led by General Pervaiz Musharraf has laid its cards on the table.

The intention is clear: Nawaz Sharif and those high-ups who were involved in preventing the PIA plane carrying general Musharraf and 200 other passengers have committed a crime for which they deserve punishment.

Allows no diversions
In expressing this intention the general Pervaiz Musharraf has removed all growing doubts about whether he was at all serious in translating his verbal accusations against the members of the previous government of conspiracy in a tangible case.
But a natural result of the FIR filing is that it has rolled the ball of Nawaz Sharif's future in a narrow tunnel that only goes up to a verdict and allows no diversions. When the coup took place and Mr Sharif was deposed a naive but widely-shared view was that all the noise being made by the military leaders about a conspiracy behind not allowing the PIA plane to land at the Karachi Air Port was perhaps an attempt to scare Mr Sharif into submission.
Most thought that the real charge against Mr Sharif would be on corruption and loan defaults. This innocent optimism particularly gripped the Pakistan Muslim League whose leadership never took seriously the conspiracy allegation that the General had repeatedly repeated in all his speeches, press statements and interviews.

No chance to escape
So there were many who, for different reasons, believed that the post-coup prosecution of Mr Sharif would not necessarily mean that the former prime minister would be neutralised for good. They saw political life for Nawaz Sharif even after the coup. What fed this view was the home-truth of Pakistani politics that a Punjab-based establishment would not take on a Punjabi prime minister.
Nawaz Sharif's political record also reinforced this view. Dismissed on corruption charges, he was restored to power by the Supreme Court; forced to quit power by the Army and he returned to power with the heaviest mandate any prime minister ever had in Pakistan. Perhaps he would come back again, was the feeling.
He might have, with much luck and half-a-dozen miracles. But that was before the FIR was filed. Now the stage is completely set for his prosecution; the ground for him to expect light punishment has also narrowed to zero because of the grave nature of charges against him. He could be given a death penalty or a life sentence. This is how serious the matter is.
Which raises the stakes for the military rulers as well. They were on stable ground for as long as they were seen keeping Nawaz Sharif in protective custody because of the peculiar circumstances that prevail after every military coup.

Popular cause to espouse
It helped their case for taking over power when they spoke about of the legendary corruption of the former rulers because the symbols of this charge were all over the place. In any case, prosecuting the corrupt is generally a popular cause to espouse in a country where a minority has accumulated fabulous riches by keeping a majority in wretched poverty, and where the rich become richer through their blank indifference to rules.
However, prosecuting a former prime minister on charges of hijacking and murder is a different thing altogether. Of course the Generals will shrug their starred shoulders and say, with good reason, that this case, like loan default and corruption cases, involves the simple principle of enforcing the writ of law. If the former prime minister actually played with the lives of so many passengers, including the head of the Army, then he should be brought to justice.

Historical friction
That is indeed true. But even truer is the fact that this is not such an open and shut case, even though the military rulers would want to see it that way. To begin with, this involves a civilian ruler and a military general. The historical friction between the two offices has always been stuff of explosive political controversy in Pakistan. The high point of this controversy was the hanging of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, an event that bitterly divided the country's body politic and poisoned its politics for decades.
Now we know that Nawaz Sharif is not Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Nor the Pakistan Muslim League looks, for the time being anyway, as potentially threatening to the establishment as the PPP did when Bhutto was nearing the gallows.
But that is besides the real point, which is that the prosecution of Nawaz Sharif on charges of conspiracy, hijacking and others can have consequences less predictable than his prosecution for corruption may have had. The military leaders have to now establish beyond any measure of reasonable doubt the ground for framing the charge. That would be hard to do.
Even if their evidence is incontrovertible, and they have tapes of Mr Sharif's conversations with the control tower or other officials passing orders not to allow the plane to land, it will always be open to question, certainly by the Muslim League, and also by that section of the public opinion that is already drawing stretched analogies between 1979 and 1999.

Controversial choice of court
No less controversial will be the fact that the case has been filed in an Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC). To say that since Nawaz Sharif himself had created the courts has no right to object to his prosecution through these does not change the basic fact that these forums for dispensing justice have been subject of heated debate in Pakistan.
Indeed Nawaz Sharif fell out with the Judiciary over the establishment of these courts for they considered them an affront to the norms of genuine justice. If Nawaz Sharif is found guilty of the charges against him by the Anti-Terrorist Court, he will appeal to the higher judiciary, which we know has little regard for the whole ATC system.
Any higher court upholding the verdict of an ATA court in a case like this would be mindful of the fact that this would endorse the ATCs as a permanent and formally-approved system of dispensing justice.
These issues, and others too, will come up as the prosecution proceeds, unleashing dynamics, that even the most-hands-on general of gumption like Musharraf might have difficulty in controlling.

Syed Talat Hussain