All Patriotic Pakistanis salute people like Ramday for fighting to create a country of laws like Quaid e Azam fought for..
As we all know, the Supreme Court judge has been locked up in his home in Lahore since November 3. Qurratulain, who is popularly known as ‘Annie’, looks around me before answering the question. I wonder why her eyes straddle the space. And then it hits me. She is under surveillance! The wife of Justice Khalilur Rehman Ramday has grown accustomed to being watched by Musharraf’s spooks since July last.
“After the July 20 judgment by the Supreme Court bench headed by my husband dismissing the reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, a surveillance cell was formed to shadow us wherever we went,” Annie says. The couple flew to Amsterdam few days after the judgment to visit their daughter.** “At the Schiphol Airport we were greeted by two slimy Pakistanis with cameras hanging around their necks. We knew they were not genuine journalists but operatives working for agencies in Pakistan. These men followed us like dogs everywhere.” Later when Annie and her husband flew to Geneva to visit her sister, state operatives there too continued to stalk them.**
Justice Ramday knew that Musharraf would never forgive him for letting the chief justice off the hook. But what he didn’t know was that the presidential camp would stoop so low as to start harassing the judge and his wife. “We were made to feel like outlaws or some hardened criminals who had absconded,” she says.
Back home the propaganda machine against a sitting judge of the Supreme Court was cranked up. It was spewing dirt on Justice Ramday’s person too. The dirty tricks brigade was desperately trying to establish an “unholy alliance” between the judge and Aitzaz Ahsan who had argued Mr Chaudhry’s case before Justice Ramday’s bench. “Khalil was to speak at an invited event in Norway, but when he heard that Aitzaz Ahsan too was coming, he came back to Amsterdam the next day.”
Annie was angry with her husband when he declined to accompany her to London because he didn’t want the wags saying that he had gone there to meet Mian Nawaz Sharif. “Even the driver from the embassy was eavesdropping on us all the time and pretending to take our pictures.”
Annie returned to Lahore on October 28. Five days later they were put under house arrest. “We were out to dine at the Punjab Club on the night of November 3. An hour after we got home, a colonel in uniform walked into our house and invited himself into the drawing room. He called for Khalil who had retired to the bedroom. We were duly informed by the man in uniform that our house was surrounded by Rangers and that nobody could leave. We were told that Khalil’s services had been terminated.”
Musharraf’s vendetta against the judge who dismissed his reference had thus come full circle. During the June/July hearings, the president’s men had applied full pressure on Justice Ramday to rule against the chief justice, but the brave judge, honest to the bones, stood his ground.
“They tried indicting our son who has his own law firm in anything they could lay their hands on. They combed through his firm’s tax records and dug deep to plumb out any wrongdoing. They failed miserably at nailing him,” says Annie who told her son that he should have taped the harassing telephone calls he received every day from the agencies. “He would have at least some proof to tell the world how he was put in a pressure cooker because he happened to be Ramday’s son.”
Justice Ramday is a clean man. He has no mansions to hide; no bank balances to deny; no worldly wealth to conceal. Unlike the legal biggies in the government today, he has no shady deals or house building loans with minimum interest to shroud. The mental, physical and emotional torture that the family has faced since July last is unprecedented.
We should hang our heads in shame that senior judges are treated like serial criminals just because they refuse to kowtow to the whims of a government. Khalil Gibran’s verses explain the apathy towards such people of integrity today:
Pity the nation that acclaims the bull as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
And yet, millions of hearts beat in unison with Justice Ramday and other like him today. When he went for Haj last December, the captain and his crew of the plane came where he was sitting. “They filed before him and gave him a salute!”
Annie says hundreds of people send messages of good wishes from all over the world. “A man from Nowshera calls regularly. He told us that he had named a beautiful flower after Khalil.” On Valentine’s Day last month, the judge was declared the king of hearts by the lawyers of Lahore. Loaded with bouquets and garlands, a group of lawyers landed at the ‘sub-jail’ residence of Justice Ramday and paid him their tribute.
Annie Ramday’s praise for the lawyers is monumental. “They have ventured forth on principles, taken beatings, lost livelihoods, suffered injustice, yet their spirit remains unbroken.” She strongly suggests to the winners in the recent elections to support the lawyers’ movement and not dilute it with their own political agendas.
As for the injustice being perpetrated, she says, “I am hurt. I am pained. What has Khalil done to be imprisoned?” And the biggest cut of all is that not a single diplomat or a foreign government has spoken in support of the restoration of the judiciary. “America and the EU claim to be champions of human rights, yet not one of their emissaries has ever bothered to contact us.”
Long live the lawyers’ movement. It will not be pulverised because it’s indigenous; it’s genuine; its sponsors are not foreign governments; its agenda is not political power; its heroes are men of integrity, and above blame.
