By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

In what might be called establishment telepathy in South Asia, even as government leaders in Sri Lanka were condemning the first anniversary of Aragalaya’s May 9 last year,  the military in Pakistan was calling May 9 this year a “black chapter” in the country’s history. That from an agency that has turned Pakistan’s entire history into one whole black book. Equally, as well, from the remnants of a Sri Lankan administration that drove the country’s economy into bankruptcy and precipitated the Aragalaya protests. The reference to May 9 and black chapter in Pakistan came in a statement of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the Army’s media wing, condemning civilian protests “targeting army property and installations.” Not mentioned in the statement, of course, was what had provoked the protests, namely, the dramatic and high handed para-military arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in a civilian courthouse in Islamabad, on Tuesday, May 9. That was the real black chapter written yet again last week by the country’s politico-military establishment.

But Pakistan’s Supreme Court had other ideas. Within three days of his arrest, the apex Court ordered the state to produce Imran Khan in person and then proceeded to declare the arrest illegal. Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial welcomed Imran Khan as he was produced before the Court and said, “Good to see you.” A government minister called it “love affair” between the judiciary and Imran Khan, but the Chief Justice and two of his brother judges who heard the matter were scathing in their condemnation of the source of the arrest warrant and the manner of its execution. 

Declaring the arrest “unlawful,” the Court ordered the former cricket hero and Prime Minister to be kept overnight as a state guest in the Islamabad Police Lines Guest House, and to be produced before the Islamabad High Court on Friday morning for the hearing of Mr. Khan’s Writ Petition challenging the National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) action against him in the Al-Qadir Trust case – one of 120 cases that the government has generated against the former Prime Minister since his ouster in April 2022. “You will have to accept the High Court’s decision,” the Chief Justice told Mr. Khan.

Close Down the Courts!

On Friday, different benches of the Islamabad High Court granted Imran Khan multiple reliefs – a two-week bail in the Al-Qadir Trust case, a stay until the second week of June in the Toshakhana case, and a blanket order barring his arrest anywhere in Pakistan. The High Court Justices continued the barbed exchanges that the Justices of the Supreme Court had started earlier against the government for the high-court and high-noon arrest of Imran Khan on Tuesday. When the Advocate General for the government argued that that the High Court could not grant Mr. Khan bail because the army had been deployed in the capital, one of the judges (Justice Aurangzeb) mockingly savaged him: “Mr. Advocate General, you should advise your government to close down the courts.” He went on to ask if martial law had been imposed in Pakistan.

The court rulings and the free flowing obiter exchanges of the justices have given a major fillip to Imran Khan and his political party, PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, meaning Pakistan Movement for Justice) in what they insist to be their search for justice and for early elections in Pakistan. The court proceedings have also undermined the veracity of the allegations levelled against Imran Khan and reinforced the common cynicism about the 120 or so cases that the government has trumped up against him. In particular, the Supreme Court Justices took to task the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) for its “contempt of court,” abuse of court staffers, and its humiliating treatment of “public representatives,” all of which, the Justices said, must come to an end. 

The NAB was created in November 1999 by President Pervez Musharraf, the country’s fourth military dictator, as a federal institution to fight corruption. The NAB has sweeping powers to conduct investigations, and inquiries, issue arrest warrants, and to pursue litigations. While the Bureau may have been effective in exposing and punishing corruption among unelected state officials, it has also become a government instrument against political opponents, a vehicle for abusing power and institutionalising corruption. According to Badar Alam, editor of the magazine Herald, the Bureau is “the brainchild of a military dictator,” which “exists to allow selective corruption to take place and to target political rivals.” 

The Supreme Court has become the NAB’s principal detractor, and the arrest of Imran Khan has given the court and other NAB critics a new cudgel to assail the Bureau. The cases against Imran Khan are simply too numerous to be serious. His followers and many independent observers consider them to be trumped up excuses to harass and take out a popular politician. Almost all the cases target Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi (Khan’s third wife with whom he shares a spiritual affinity for Sufism, a mystical manifestation in Sunni Islam) implicate them for allegedly benefiting from the corrupt practices of others, but every case targets only Khan and wife and none of the principal actors involved.  

Imran Khan has evaded, if not defied, investigation and inquiry, and turned to the court of the people to make his political case with the call for immediate elections. He is currently the most popular political leader in the country and his party is widely expected to do very well in an election. He has also started criticizing the army directly and even named an army officer for last November’s assassination attempt on him. The Army (IPRS) issued an unusually pointed statement personally reprimanding him for making “highly irresponsible and baseless allegations against a serving senior military officer without any evidence.” It was this statement that is supposed to have been the cue for the government and NAB to go ahead with the arrest of Imran Khan that has now spectacularly backfired. 

The government leaders are furious at the aftermath of the arrest and have not desisted from criticizing the Supreme Court for being “overly sympathetic” to Imran Khan and his PTI. But legal opinion seems to be in support of the court ruling and its calming effect on a troubled country. The arrest on Tuesday provoked violent protests including attacks on houses of army officials. The army had to be called in to maintain order in Islamabad, as well as in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces. After the Supreme Court ruling, Imran Khan has called for peace while noting that he was not in the know of what was going on in the country after his arrest and until he was brought before the courts. But he is still defiant and had earlier responded to the army’s accusation that “This is my army and my Pakistan. I don’t need to lie.”

The story of Pakistan

Imran Khan is not the first former Prime Minister to be arrested in Pakistan. A good number of his predecessors share that dubious honour with him. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Pakistan’s fifth Prime Minister, was arrested in January 1962 and was jailed without trial for his refusal to endorse General Ayub Khan’s military regime. Fifteen years later, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party, was arrested on the orders of another military dictator, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Bhutto was arbitrarily sentenced to death and executed on April 4, 1979. His daughter Benazir Bhutto served as Pakistan’s prime minister twice (1988-1990 and 1993-1996), was arrested multiple times while out of office, was placed under house arrest, and occasionally barred from political activities. She was killed by a suicide bomber after a rally in Rawalpindi on 27 December 2007 during the dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf. 

Her successor, political rival and Zia loyalist, Nawaz Sharif, was similarly treated to arrests and exile by General Musharraf and the NAB. In 2017, Nawaz Sharif was removed from office and barred from holding public office by the Supreme Court following the Panama Papers revelations. He is now in London on ‘expired bail’ after going there for medical treatment. He is still the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N), which is the leading party in the current governing coalition, with younger brother Shebaz Sharif as Prime Minister. The younger Sharif was earlier arrested in a NAB money laundering case, and so was the interim PML-N Prime Minister  Shahid Khaqan Abbasi  who had succeeded Nawaz Sharif.

Quite a welter of prime-ministerial arrests, and that has been the political story of Pakistan after its partition birth in 1947. Imran Khan might consider himself to be “singularly blessed,” as the newspaper Dawn editorially noted the day after the Supreme Court ruled his arrest was unlawful. But the paper has also warned that Mr. Khan’s legal troubles are not over and that he must “face the charges brought against him without any further confrontation.” That has been his modus operandi ever since he was ousted from office in April 2022 by a No Confidence Motion in Parliament, the first against a sitting Pakistani Prime Minister.

Not for the first time Pakistan is at the crossroads of history. The difference now is that the country’s military establishment, for long the bulwark of perverse stability, is facing the real threat of a popular uprising. Imran Khan has made many mistakes as Prime Minister, but his calls for justice and elections are resonating powerfully with the people. The judiciary has been dragged into the fray and the Supreme Court has put the state, and not so indirectly the army, on notice that they are responsible for his safety and security of life. The judicial interventions have given time for all the parties to the political crisis to plot their plans for the weeks and months ahead. 

The paradox is that just as Imran Khan cannot avoid facing the charges against him, no matter how trumped up they are, the government cannot indefinitely keep delaying parliamentary elections that most people are agitating for. And all of this against the backdrop of a seriously impaired economy and bailout talks with IMF that are going no where. General Elections have the effect of releasing pent up steam and providing a new starting point even if by universal experience nothing too much different happens after elections. But the cycle needs to go on to avoid a violent a calamity.