by AJAI SHUKLA
The Pakistan Army’s overlordship of that country’s national security decision-making has scarred New Delhi’s engagement with Islamabad, undermining the dialogue between the two countries. In any discussions, India’s Team A only meets Pakistan’s Team B. After they finish talking, Pakistan’s Team A — viz. the Pakistan Army, which wields a veto over everything the diplomats and bureaucrats have discussed — rules on the outcome from General Headquarters (GHQ), Rawalpindi.
But that stranglehold is being challenged within Pakistan in tentative but unmistakable ways. Following President Asif Ali Zardari’s extended confrontations with the generals, now the judiciary has fired a broadside across the military’s bows. On Thursday, Pakistan’s Supreme Court issued its detailed verdict in the Air Chief Marshal (Retired) Asghar Khan case, in which it has ordered action against former army chief, General Mirza Aslam Beg, and his spymaster, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) head, Lieutenant General Asad Durrani, for funnelling Rs 14 crore to various political parties to rig the outcome of the 1990 elections.
Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the battle-scarred campaigner who was instrumental in unseating President Pervez Musharraf, threw his full weight behind that verdict. After some TV news channels (a match in inanity for our own) reported that the Court Registrar had authored the judgment, the Supreme Court officially clarified that a three-judge bench headed by the chief justice himself had delivered it.
In its judgment on the case, which had remained a judicial hot potato since 1996, Justice Chaudhry enjoined soldiers to uphold the Constitution, even if he received orders from his seniors ordering otherwise. For the military, this must have sounded like, “Tell the general you’re not available for the coup.”
Such judicial strictures could not but provoke a military that is already under pressure from the media and from President Asif Ali Zardari. The president from the traditionally anti-military Pakistan People’s Party has repeatedly taken on the khakis (as Pakistani liberals disparagingly call the military), denting the army’s aura of omnipotence. Since 2008, when the Zardari government was forced to quickly withdraw a notification placing the ISI under the Interior Ministry, Zardari has grown steadily bolder. Last year he refused to back down in the so-called Memogate affair, when the military effectively accused Zardari of asking Washington for protection against a possible coup after Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad. This after a fleeting moment of legislative oversight, when the military was forced to explain to parliament why it could not prevent US Special Forces from mounting a military operation in the Pakistani heartland.
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)