Time for hope or doom

The whole house of the newly elected honourable members of the National Assembly resonated with spontaneous thunderous applause and thumping of desks on March 24, 2007, as Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani announced his first executive order to immediately release the deposed judges, concluding his maiden speech after being unanimously elected leader of the house.

He exuberated with confidence and exercised his authority like a man with an eye on the destiny of the nation that he was just chosen to lead and the order was obeyed at near lightning speed. A few days earlier on the evening of March 7, the beaming PPP and PML-N leaders held a joint televised press conference in the hill resort of Bhurban, to sign an accord to strengthen democracy, reinstate deposed judges within thirty days to the November 2, 2007 position and to cooperate in forming coalition governments in the centre and Punjab. General (retd) Pervez Musharraf buckled under sixteen months of mounting pressure culminating in the real prospect of impeachment and resigned from the office of President of Pakistan on August 18. These were the three finest moments for the present government, democracy and for the people of Pakistan.

Four political parties and FATA members joined hands to successfully install governments in the centre and the four provinces but the spirit of coalition has been missing since then. The PPP that leads the coalition, being the party with the largest number of seats, dragged its feet on the agreed reinstatement of judges within thirty days by introducing a unworkable constitutional package proposing more than eighty amendments and making the reinstatement conditional to its passage through the parliament and senate requiring two third majority votes.

The PML-N ministers resigned from their cabinet posts as a protest but the party continued to negotiate with PPP to save its government in the Punjab. A breakthrough was achieved on August 7 after three days of parleys when a joint communiqué was read out by Mr Asif Ali Zardari in the presence of all coalition partners to commence proceedings to impeach the president and agreeing to reinstate the judges immediately afterwards. However, that was not to be. The president has resigned but the matter of reinstatement of judges once again remains merely a topic for discussion and broken agreements that led to the split of PML-N with the PPP.

The poor public is living on promises and hopes while the leaders are busy politicking and the country suffers. The nation has faced a downslide ever since the upheaval caused by the removal of the chief justice in March 2007. The lawyers carried through a relentless peaceful movement that was joined by men and women of all ages from all sections of society, rich and poor. This movement, headed by SCBA president Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan with his team of dedicated and committed lawyers, gained momentum against all odds purely on the perception of its sincerity of purpose to make the judiciary independent of the pressures from the executive and political forces that appeared plausible for once in the sixty one years life of our country.