TO many, it is mind-boggling: why President Asif Ali Zardari and his political team continue to play Russian roulette with their government’s future. At another level, it is not hard to work out.
The PPP has had gamblers’ luck in the last three years. It has performed remarkable feats, not the least of which is staying in power despite a deluge of financial scandals and well-documented cases of individual corruption. President Zardari’s political manoeuvring has been brilliant: he has completely outplayed the PML-N and even got the better of the usually on-top-of-things MQM. A less lucky leadership would have found it hard to stay in the seat of political authority in the face a complete meltdown of law and order in Karachi, and a grim economic crisis.
Emboldened by his successes, President Zardari seems to have taken the decision to stay on the same path. He has played a deadly game of chance and won every round so far. This is also how he will conduct himself in the remaining years of this government’s tenure. He is secure in the knowledge that the PPP vote bank in Sindh, and the new element of political militancy that he has carefully nurtured in the party ranks is resilient. He is also confident that he can face off any reaction to the course of derring-do on which he has steered the government.
This is the context in which a usually supine Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has been showing defiance to a judiciary he previously never missed an opportunity to praise. Prime Minister Gilani, like other PPP’s stalwarts, is going by the script the president has penned with the able assistance of legal hawks such as Babar Awan.
But like all players of Russian roulette, President Zardari must have worked out some probability of success besides banking on pure luck. For instance, he knows that by keeping Prime Minister Gilani up against the judiciary, he is taking minimum personal risks.
If a sitting chief executive and his whole cabinet take on the judges and accuse them of manifest bias, then the ensuing pressure on the judiciary is sustained and effective. The president and his office can stay in the background. And if the judiciary does not relent and there is a head-on collision between the executive and the judicial arms of the state, the ensuing chaos might be to the PPP’s advantage since it can play the martyr and contest the next polls on the wave of voter sympathy.
The other calculation in taking on the judiciary seems to relate to the role of the armed forces. Since the embarrassing events of the last few months, the army leadership is too bogged down in fixing its deeply wounded image and lifting its sagging morale to be of any real threat to the present government.
The tense relations between the presidency and GHQ before the killing of Osama bin Laden have turned into a rather convenient arrangement: President Zardari does as he pleases in the political field in return for his party’s unconditional support to the armed forces in these times of plummeting prestige and mounting foreign pressure.
The assumption also centres on President Zardari’s reading of the complete absence of political alternatives available to the army. Even if Gen Kayani wanted to clip his wings, he could not because he has no political force to rely on. In any case, a chief of army staff on an extended tenure and battling an insurgency and an image problem is hardly in a position to contrive political moves against an elected government.
It is this formula of calculated risks combined with proven political luck that has gone into the toughening of the PPP’s stance against the judiciary and explains the ease with which its leadership is hurtling down the course of confrontation.Yet, there are a few issues that might crop up to spoil the thrill of the game. One is that luck runs out as frequently as it smiles. And when that happens, the smallest mistake can cause the biggest disaster. The most recent example is that of Gen Pervez Musharraf’s fall. Not even in his wildest dreams could he have imagined that sacking a seemingly pliant judge would cause him to trip so badly that the combined strength of the army, America and his political allies could not pull him up again.
In different eras Nawaz Sharif, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayub Khan — all men with god-complexes — went the same way: swiftly, unexpectedly, thrown off by events they thought they could control. Like his predecessors, President Zardari is spinning the chamber of the gun too frequently to escape unhurt.
Also, he is assuming too much. The assumption about the judiciary being stung by accusations of partisanship to the point of becoming controversial and losing national support is not sound. The PPP’s stance on the Haj and NICL cases is weak. The prime minister’s move in taking recourse to his authority to transfer bureaucrats was too transparent an attempt at covering up financial bungling to deserve even procedural support.
His government has treated the judiciary with slow, incremental but deliberate contempt. The matters on which this contempt has been doled out are not ordinary issues of postings and transfers: they include investigations into scams that have cost the national exchequer billions. The judges, by showing patience and perseverance, have adequately neutralised the accusation of being politically biased. If President Zardari decides to take on the judges, he might be surprised by the reaction in favour of the judiciary.
The most unexpected surprise might come from the military establishment which, though considerably weakened by recent botch-ups, might be forced to take a stand and choose sides between the chief justice and the president. That is a point President Zardari must avoid reaching, because there the odds of his government and his presidency surviving might be lower than he is able to calculate right now.
0 comments:
Post a Comment