Re: PM candidate: Amin Faheem or surprise candidate? (merged)
I totally agree with you Aalsi…the next big step the country can make towards democracy is to make the political parties democratic…but I believe this transition will eventually take palce…
Rise of people like Aitzaz Ahsan is a big example of this transition going on in the country…
http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=98617
Aitzaz’s future
The Pakistan report card
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Fasi Zaka
Every couple of years the newspapers run stories about allegations that India’s RAW has released thousands of beautiful agents in the country to seduce our power brokers. Whatever the truth of the matter, it seems the resonance of the Mata Hari still prevails. She was a beautiful Dutch courtesan and dancer who spied for opposing sides during World War I, eventually being executed for her crimes. Mata Hari was a woman devoted to her own progress, she recognized no nations. Quite often I have seen the problem of Mata Hari to be akin to that of the legal profession. Lawyers are like courtesans, they are paid to celebrate another individual, no matter how invidious their character or circumstances. They parley words as the tricks of their trade, much like a Geisha does.
Of lawyers with silver tongues, I always thought Aitzaz Ahsen was one, and quite unfairly too. I have only met him once, and that too several years ago when I was shooting and scripting a documentary on east-west relations. I interviewed him at length, and found him to be charming and astute, though digressing in his answers so often that my central questions (which were fairly trite and clichéd) were never answered. In the end, I removed Aitzaz on the cutting floor of the edit room.So when Aitzaz started to spear head the lawyer’s movement, I was dubious of his motives and that too because of the trivial incident I mentioned in the previous paragraph. He has always been calm under distress, smiling, cajoling and spewing invective with charm. This confidence has been unsettling, lending itself to suspicion of the man who does not lose it. If he is so calm, does he really care?
The past year has proven a lot about the nature of the man. The juncture of democracy we find ourselves standing in today can be traced back to Aitzaz’s audacity fuelled by the initial belligerence of a chief justice who tried to uphold the law. In Musharraf’s Presidency, 2007 was the watershed year. He had begun to overstep boundaries with little remorse. When he dismissed the chief justice, there was supreme discontent, but it could have dissipated had it not been for the strategic insight of Aitzaz to take the issue to the streets under the garb of the bar council meets.
Pulling that off made the issue of the judiciary relevant for the first time in an age when the pressing needs have been the provision of basic services, like staple foods, electricity and gas. The dormant opposition found a bipartisan issue under which it could flex its muscles once again.
Many things weakened Musharraf last year, but nothing compares to the image of two men, Aitzaz and the Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry questioning the legitimacy of one man whom the nation had come to see as a permanent fixture in the political landscape. With the return of the big wigs of the political parties, the agenda that was driven by the lawyers of Pakistan was appropriated by the political spectrum, and it has rewarded them handsomely in the elections. Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari both speak of the independence of the judiciary as a priority action point. Where will Aitzaz fit into all of this?
Before the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the party wasn’t entirely overjoyed in embracing what Aitzaz was doing for Pakistan. The PPP had grown a monster whose public profile and commitment to democracy began to outrank its own while it wasn’t looking from the plush concrete desert of Dubai.
I wonder how often Aitzaz’s name comes up now in the deliberations of Nawaz and Zardari. In the buoyant mood of the return to democracy it is only just that Aitzaz become a custodian of the rule of law either as prime minsiter or the president. But, I doubt this will happen, even though all parties now want a national government, the two main parties won’t support a national figure.
Once the judiciary is restored, if the PML-N and the PPP actually do it, what will become of Aitzaz who made the issue a cause célèbre?** When Zardari spoke to Newsweek that he was the PPP’s most famous member, he made the error exiles do who have returned after a long sojourn. He just wasn’t up to date. While Zardari maybe have been the most famous member of the PPP after his spouse in the 90’s, it was for all the wrong reasons. This decade belongs to Aitzaz. Whether he is allotted an institutional role or not, it seems the man who came out of the wilderness to defend a hero (Chaudhry Iftikhar), ended becoming one himself. **
The writer is a Rhodes Scholar and former academic. Email: [email protected]