Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: In a bizarre yet predictable move, the National Assembly on Tuesday passed the 28th Constitutional Amendment Bill, giving the military courts a new lease of life. The extension was approved nearly ten weeks after the sun had set on the constitutional provision that allowed military to try civilians.

Civil society, including a prominent section of the legal fraternity, has heavily criticised the post 21st amendment military courts on account of their opaqueness as well as the violation of citizens’ rights to fair trial and legal counsel, guaranteed by the Constitution. It was expected, particularly of the parties having borne the brunt of military dictatorships and civil-military tensions, to break shackles for once. They should have owned the responsibility of passing corrective measures to strengthen the civilian judicial system. Such reforms could have prevented stopgap arrangements like military courts and their imposition on the body politic. This, unfortunately, remained a dream set in fools’ paradise. Political parties once again did what they do best in Pakistan: get browbeaten under the pressure of a peculiar civ-mil equation. Or was it a convenient way to transfer responsibility to the military establishment?

Seldom has such a broad range of political parties agreed on any issue like this. Despite tall claims by the so-called “liberal and progressive” political parties, all of them sang exactly the same tune on the floor on Tuesday. Ghulam Ahmed Bilour of ANP, Nafisa Shah of PPP, Zahid Hamid and Ishaq Dar of PMLN, Ijazul Haq of PML-Z, and others spoke in unison; favouring military trial of civilians as “desperate measures in desperate times”. This was indeed a rhetorical and hackneyed line used throughout the proceedings by everyone who spoke in the Parliament.

Ironically, common sense and the basics of civilian responsibility seemed lost on the lawmakers. Common sense would have demanded to use a stopgap arrangement in the civilian sphere to address the gaps in judicial system; and question why such gaps have been allowed to exist in the first place. The basics of civilian responsibility would have guided the political parties to, at least, maintain a semblance of civilian authority howsoever desperate the times might be.

Ceding whatever little space democratic forces might have is hardly expedient nor wins any breathing space for civilian stakeholders. Intra-party dictatorship under the burden of defection clause is today’s biggest question that democracy confronts and which the political parties have to address.

Whatever the circumstances may be, the 21st day of March in 2017 presents another bleak picture of Pakistan’s democracy, painted by the so-called democratic forces for themselves.