Emergency to emergency, the capture of the Lawyers’ Movement

“The first two days in Attock were the worst moments of my life,” senior lawyer Muneer A. Malik writes of his imprisonment during General Pervez Musharraf’s emergency rule in 2007. “I was completely cut off from the rest of the world, and my only contact was with the mushaqati.”

But the mushaqati—who was serving the final two weeks of his two-year narcotics possession sentence—had been around long enough to know how to smuggle messages out. Though he had no pen or paper, he plucked a red rose, squeezed the petals to fashion a nib, and had Mr Malik write a phone number “in rose ink” on his undershirt.

Soon enough, the terrible conditions of Mr Malik’s confinement were beamed to the public on private television channels. Word reached as far as a brother in the United States.

The press, then and now

The press, in fact, played a key role in the Lawyers’ Movement that Mr Malik helped lead. The movement exploded over visuals of a serving chief justice being yanked by the hair, and would be sustained by live coverage of marches and court proceedings. This is hard to overstate: without the media, there would have been no movement.

Fast-forward two decades, and we find ourselves in another country. What Mr Malik referred to as some of his worst days seem generous by comparison. No television channel, private or otherwise, will tell us what conditions the human rights fighters Imaan Mazari and Hadi Chattha are being kept in. What they will tell us is that they have been sentenced to 10 years this past week, for no more than removing a road barrier.

Thorny new defamation laws also seek to curb forbidden thoughts, while an all-seeing eye hovers over social media. State organs issue flurries of call-up notices over what they dub anti-state posts: “You are not clicking alone,” one official said two weeks ago. (The tagline from Orwell’s 1984, “Big Brother is watching you,” comes to mind.)

In what other place, after all, can a man be sentenced to seventeen years for hitting the retweet button?

The judiciary, then and now

It was an ashen-faced Pervez Musharraf who declared the emergency on November 3, 2007. “Inaction at this moment is suicide for Pakistan,” the general said, “and I cannot allow this country to commit suicide.”

Though he blamed terrorism, it was all a bit of a ruse: Musharraf was dreading an imminent Supreme Court decision on whether he could continue to cling to the presidency while still in his khakis. The Court, led by Iftikhar Chaudhry, sprang into action: it declared the proclamation of emergency unconstitutional and directed fellow judges not to take Musharraf’s new oath. By nightfall, most of the bench was under house arrest.

But the point had been made, and it broke new ground: when the courts had poked the bear in the past, it was often after the bear had gone into hibernation. (Asma Jilani slammed the Yahya junta when the general was already under house arrest; detailed reasons in Darwesh M. Arbey came out years after Bhutto had sought martial law and military trials of civilians; the court rejected Zia’s party-less elections while he was still alive but only gave effect to Benazir Bhutto after the plane crash.)

Musharraf’s emergency was different: it was defied by the judges in real time, when the regime was in full swing. As the Supreme Court said of itself in Sindh High Court Bar Association, “Certainly, it was the first time in the history of Pakistan that the judiciary, instead of accepting or acquiescing in the situation as per past practice, acted boldly and independently and took the most-ever needed step, which conspicuously lacked in the past.” This would also set the stage for the victory of the Lawyers’ Movement, and the judges’ eventual restoration.

We come now to emergencies of the present. While terrorism is trotted out again as an excuse, Prime........

© Dawn Prism