Daily Times

Some petitioners have already knocked on the court’s door for the follow up on the implementation of the National Accountability Ordinance (NRO) verdict. Imran Khan, the leader of the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) has also announced that he would go to court, and soon the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) would follow suit. Nevertheless, the newly elected prime minister seems resolved to protect his president and the party’s co-chairman, Mr Asif Ali Zardari, from being hauled into the Swiss courts. Thus it seems another round of a judicial-executive tussle, and possibly another judicial dismissal of an elected prime minister are on the cards.

Which raises the question: has our political culture come under a judicial spell? In other words, have our political leaders chosen to use the judiciary’s shoulder to shoot down the government, keeping them conveniently confined to hollow rhetoric and statistically egregious TV talk shows? Are they mindful of the heavy cost of putting the judiciary and government on a collision course? If the answers are in the affirmative, it would be disastrous.

Today’s public representatives are different from their earlier counterparts — courtiers, clerics, cabals, councils and so on — who worked solely for or under a dynastic ruler, absolutely unaccountable to the ruled. It was because the sovereign drew legitimacy from his ‘divine right’ and glory from foreign expeditions and acquisitions. Even a ‘little corporal’ and Corsican upstart, Napoleon Bonaparte, earned his ‘glory’ and held on to the French throne by the miracles of the martial mind.

Contrarily, the legitimacy of a government today is not embodied in the hands that hold a scimitar, but in the hands of the electorate, and the glory of a ruler lies in his or her successful protection of the electorate’s rights and liberties. Likewise, today’s democratic opposition is considered as a government-in-waiting. It is equally responsible for protecting the electorate’s interests, employing constitutional and political tools — parliamentary rules and procedures, public discourse and whistle-blowing, alternative policies and constructive criticism, peaceful and issue-based protests, and forging new alliances to bring a government down. An opposition makes a judicial resort, if at all, when larger constitutional conundrums are coming in the way of running the state affairs, not to score points against political opponents.

Unfortunately, our opposition has turned so inured to judicial intervention that even strictly political issues, like the ‘memogate’, are thrust upon the judges. The PTI and the PML-N leadership would seem be camping inside the Supreme Court, rather than mobilising their ‘millions of workers’ against the government. And why not? The way the government has been taken to task by the courts, one finds even the Nuremberg trials launched against the Nazi collaborators a less earnest affair.

As a result, the opposition has almost abdicated from its social responsibilities in the areas where the government has criminally failed to deliver. For example, thousands of schools are closed for years in Sindh due to bureaucratic and governmental inefficiency and maladministration. Millions of poor children are deprived of their constitutional right to education and to a decent life. But neither Sharif nor Imran Khan nor any other political leader has bothered to raise this issue.

As a result, education — curricula, attendance, teaching, infrastructure, implementing tools and testing — has seen a continuous deterioration. So much so that now even the conscientious Pakistan People’s Party’s MPs and ministers are condemning their government. The situation is equally bad in other social areas, be it health, housing, works, communication and law and order. As a result, people are becoming increasingly disappointed with both the inept rulers and the opposition. They have started taking things in their own hands, whether for a good or bad reason. In the recent energy riots in Punjab, all political parties’ leaders became the target of the public’s wrath. These are the early telltale signs of impending chaos if the situation worsens any further.

Informed people also wonder how in other politically divisive and administratively ineffectual systems the political opposition is performing its quasi-state functions. They see the Nexalites in the south of India, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as some of the cases exemplifying socially committed opposition. Notwithstanding their extreme methods and ideologies, they are running schools and hospitals, providing financial help to the poor, and protecting the weak from the strong and wicked state and non-state elements. The recent election of Mohammad Morsi as the Egyptian president may well reflect the people’s aversion to Mubarak’s odious era, but it also shows the public appreciation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s decades-long social services.

Why can our political leadership not connect with the masses socially, in addition to politically? Why do they not use their political platforms to ameliorate the lot of common man in his local habitat, where he is exposed to a plethora of ethnic and sectarian mafias, rent-seeking bureaucrats, and oppressive industrial, feudal and tribal interests? Considering the ever-weakening state authority at the central, provincial and district levels, why does the national political leadership not come forward to provide protection and render services to the common man in their polis — which in Greek means a city state, and from which the term politics has been extracted. Indeed, the local social politics would easily connect the national leaders with both the rural and the urban fastnesses.

Historically, people have cherished leaders who stood with them in their direst moments and in hellish places. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan and Indira Gandhi in India did such endearing politics. They reached out to the neglected and wretched masses, deep inside the hinterlands. But today, the rural constituencies have been branched out to powerful tribal-feudal interests by all the political parties, including the PTI, the new kid on the ethical-political block. As a result, much of the country — Baluchistan, FATA, south Punjab, rural Sindh and Karachi — is outside the control of mainstream politics. Local masters and violent groups are calling the shots there.

It is time the opposition stuck to its assigned role and let the judiciary focus on fixing its own house. Only then will people receive justice, and the state peace and stability.

The writer is a lawyer and academic and can be reached at shahabusto@hotmail.com