This was a very interesting letter in Dawn yesterday, shedding some much reqd light on the lawyers’ behaviour and the depth of their ‘struggle’.
http://dawn.com/2007/06/17/letted.htm#1
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Lawyers and processions**
** LAST month in a talk show Mr Aitzaz Ahsan suggested that the answer to all our problems lay in handing over the reins of power to the lawyers. At the time it seemed like an excellent idea. However, I have been having second thoughts.** Here are some clips from Dawn in just two consecutive days:
- Dawn (page 5, June 1): Lawyers in Sargodha forced civil judge Farzana Bashir and her staff out of the courtroom shouting slogans because she refused to accommodate a lawyer seeking adjournment in his case.
The next day (page 2): two lawyers from the Pakistan Lawyers’ Forum, Islamabad, were thrashed and their teeth broken at Abbottabad by a mob of local lawyers. On page 5 the same day, lawyers from the Bar Association at Jhang shouted derogatory slogans against the session judge and locked him out of the courtroom, because the judge had dismissed a habeas corpus petition.*
** We have also seen the very aggressive, danda-bardar lawyers in action the whole of last month on television. If this is a harbinger of things to come, I fear that a takeover by lawyers might prove to be as bad or even worse than military rule.**
** “A huge procession went without incident, from Rawalpindi to Lahore. Not a blade of grass was bent”. Why couldn’t this happen in Karachi as well on May 12, said Mr Atizaz Ahsan. He also asserted that Karachi belongs to everyone.**
** Of course, Karachi belongs to everyone but does Lahore belong to everyone? Can Sindhis or Pakhtuns or Muhajirs or Macranis lay claim on Lahore? Of course not. Lahore belongs to Punjab. The Punjabis are a homogeneous, generally law-abiding, disciplined people where most families are connected one way or the other with the armed forces.**
The people are also comparatively prosperous not only because they are naturally hard working but also because they reap the benefits of the capital of Pakistan being located in Punjab; albeit, after it was hijacked by Ayub Khan from Karachi to Rawalpindi.
*** So on a long procession from Rawalpindi to Lahore the proverbial “blades of grass” are bound to bend differently compared to a 10-km procession from the airport to the Sindh High Court, in Karachi: a city which definitely belongs to Sindhis, Punjabis, Pathans, Muhajirs and others, all tugging in different directions and having their own axes to grind. Mr Aitzaz Ahsan ought to know this.***
*** My picture of the chief justice of the Supreme Court is a sombre, venerable figure, the personification of dignity and sobriety, dispensing unmitigated justice from his throne sitting very close to the Almighty Himself.
*** A grim, combative figure in dark glasses, with black coats tumbling all over him, followed by danda-bardar maulvis, rabble political activists carrying multi-coloured party flags, shouting “Go Musharraf go" and, of course, Mr Aitzaz Ahsan in the fray, does not fit my picture of the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan.***
It is said that people deserve the leaders that they have. I suppose this applies to chief justices as well. So we have to live with what we have but I do wish that the chief justice stopped leading processions. If he has the one and only purpose of addressing the Bar Associations and nothing else whatsoever, then why not use the telephone. Mr Altaf Hussain and other leaders use this facility very effectively from thousands of miles away. Is it mandatory that the address to a Bar Association by the chief justice has to be preceded by a long ‘juloos’ of slogan-mongering political activists and lawyers?
** What worries me most is perhaps a slip of tongue by Mr Aitzaz Ahsan at his press conference where he mentioned that when Karachi goes rioting, business moves to Punjab and now another attempt at a juloos from Karachi Airport to the Sindh High Court is being planned. **God help. Beware all Karachiites: Sindhis, Punjabis, Pakhtuns, Parsees, Muhajirs et al.
CAPT S. AFAQ RIZVI
Karachi
