A top ranking political leader is either physically eliminated or character-assassinated so much that he cannot freely perform his political responsibilities. Take the case of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. First, scandals were spread against his wife Roxana Liaquat Ali Khan by fundamentalists and the Press. Then, the Army created doubts about his patriotism (he was a Mohajir from Karnal in India), when he accepted ceasefire in Kashmir in 1948. He was shot dead in 1951 at a public meeting in Rawalpindi where 56 years later Pakistan’s only woman leader Benazir Bhutto, who had been twice Prime Minister, was killed at an election rally.
Pakistani scholars very correctly trace the unending political and social chaos in the country to the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan. What is still worse, the findings of no inquiry commission have ever been made public although his killers were well-known. His wife Begum Liaquat died pleading in vain every year on his death anniversary to punish the assassin. On the contrary, one of the suspected killers Maj Akbar was inducted in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s cabinet in 1972 despite strong protests by Begum Liaquat. Bhutto tried to placate her by making her the Governor of Sindh.
The first attack by judiciary on democracy came in March 1954 when the Federal Court (now Supreme Court) upheld the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly setting aside the Sindh High Court’s verdict against the dissolution. The Constituent Assembly was dissolved by the then Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad who feared the Assembly would curtail his powers.
From then on a clique of Generals, Judiciary, the Press and a section of politicians has come into play against democracy. The first manifestation of this was when Gen Ayub Khan staged his coup in October 1958. A section of the Press and politicians hailed the coup and the Supreme Court called it “a successful revolution”.
During Ayub Khan’s rule there were many political murders. Most sensational of them was of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s sister Fatima Jinnah in 1965. The Government said that she died of a heart attack. But those who prepared the body for burial found signs of violence on it. She had invited Gen Ayub’s ire by challenging him in the Presidential elections as a nominee of the Opposition parties in 1965. With her death, the Opposition to the military dictatorship became rudderless and weak.
Bhutto was a civilian leader but he too resorted to character-assassination and murder of rival politicians within and outside his party, the Pakistan Peoples’ Party. He was fully responsible for the 1971 military crackdown on East Bengalis who were demanding their Constitutional rights to rule Pakistan after having won the 1970 general elections. The crackdown killed about 3 million Bengalis, and broke up Pakistan.
Bhutto became the ruler of truncated Pakistan and set about settling old scores with his political rivals in very sadistic ways. He got one veteran Bengali Muslim Leaguer Khawaja Khairuddin ferried to a lonely island near Karachi to be abandoned there to die. After about two days he was spotted by the Indian fishermen who rescued him. Bhutto created his own private army, which killed his political opponents. He asked this army to kill a fellow-party man, who, in his view, was becoming bold.
The trio – Army, Judiciary and the Press became active again against politicians and democracy after Gen Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto’s Government in July 1977. The Press was used to character-assassinate him. Since jailed Bhutto and the PPP leadership were not in a position to defend themselves against the levelled at them, the Press felt itself free to carry all kinds of scandalous stories planted by the Army.
The Army had brazenly used the Judiciary to sentence Bhutto to death. The sentence was quickly carried out in April 1979 paralyzing the political leadership in Pakistan for about a decade. If Benazir Bhutto is to be believed, her younger brother Shah Nawaz was killed by the ISI in France. Then was killed Bhutto’s elder son Murtaza.
Benazir’s husband and the present President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari was charged with ordering the killing of Murtaza, who could have wrested political leadership from his sister as an heir of Bhutto. This happened in 1996 when Benazir Bhutto was the Prime Minister for the second time. Many Pakistanis believed she connived at her brother’s murder. The death of Murtaza deprived Pakistan of a good youthful leader.
When Gen Parvez Musharraf staged his coup by overthrowing Nawaz Sharif’s Government, he appeared determined to get him sentenced to death on charges of hijacking a plane on which he (Musharraf) was returning to Karachi from Colombo in October 1999. A Karachi anti-terrorism court sentenced him to life imprisonment. The Government appealed to ask death for him, but in the meantime Saudi Arabia intervened and as a result the whole Sharif clan was sent in to exile to Saudi Arabia. At that time, Benazir Bhutto was already in self-exile in London.
Gen Musharraf’s coup was hailed by politicians. Among them was Benazir Bhutto. The Supreme Court justified the coup under what it called the “law of necessity”. With Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif out of the country, he didn’t have to fear politicians much. He found it very easy to win over turncoats from the parties of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif to hammer out a Quaid Muslim League which would be installed into power after the 2002 general elections.
The only politicians who worried him were Baluch nationalist leaders. He tried to come over this problem by killing Baluch leaders including Jumhoori Watan Party’s Akbar Bugti. In December 2007 Benazir Bhutto, too, was eliminated – it is not known by whom.
The present target of the trio is President Zardari. The Army is against him because of his support to Kerry-Lugar Bill and his statements that India is not a threat to Pakistan. Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary has a grouse against Zardari because the latter resisted his reinstatement. While ruling the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) unconstitutional in December last year, the Supreme Court ordered the Government to revive money laundering cases in a Swiss Court against Zardari.
The Government cannot resist this order for very long. Zardari has, therefore, asked his Government to do what the Court has said. But it is debatable if the Swiss Court can try a Head of Government of a foreign country whose Constitution protects him/her from trial on criminal charges.
Zardari is being hounded so much by this trio and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League that he might flee into self-exile. If he does so he can still rule the country through his loyalist, the Chairman of the Senate, who, according to the Constitution, assumes the responsibilities of acting President in case of death or absence of the President.
