PAKISTAN: A constitutional crisis

It seems as if every few weeks another South Asian country slips closer to the brink. While the recent turmoil in Bangladesh received limited coverage in the West, what's now taking place in Pakistan has enormous ramifications for the United States. Check out SAJAer and Fordham law professor Anil Kalhan's write-up on the issue, on a law blog.

Following is a guest post by SAJAer and freelancer Sabahat Ashraf, who also runs the blog iFaqeer. He provides us a clear window into the crisis, by looking at coverage from the traditional media and Pakistani blogs.

------------------------------------------------------------

Pakistan is in the news again. Press photos depict lawyers with bloodied suits, lawyers hurling stones, female lawyers in full-contact battles with police--yes, professional Pakistani women out and about without their heads covered and side-by-side with their male counterparts.

It all began when General Pervez Musharraf, in his capacity as President of Pakistan, "suspended" the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. Referring to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, Article 209 explains the only mechanism for removing a Chief Justice: by a recommendation of something called the "Supreme Judicial Council". And that's where the matter has landed. It's the kind of constitutional play that stable political systems only have once every century or so, but in the volatile political history of Pakistan, have occurred all too often. There was the challenge by the then Speaker, Moulvi Tamizuddin Khan, to the dismissal of the first National Assembly; and then the uncertainty that has accompanied which Justices of the Supreme Court would ratify each bout of military rule.

As with most stories South Asian, a lot of people have been getting a lot of their news from the Beeb. Their South Asia pages have a steady stream of news, commentary (Ahmed Rashid for example), and pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. But even that pales in comparison to what is available on the BBC's Urdu section. Of course, not everyone can read Urdu, but the audio and video links and photo slide shows (recognizable by their icons) should be worth your time, especially if you do understand Urdu/Hindi.

But above all else, the country that gave you the first military coup of the Internet news era (when the web servers of federal and provincial governments were first hacked and then taken offline) now has a blogosphere that is actively monitoring the coup. The site most often followed by expats is "Pakistaniat" (with the sub-title "All Things Pakistan"), founded by Professor Adil Najam at Tufts University, and now run as a team blog. They have a good one, two, three, of the sequence of events, including a graphic of the front page of Dawn, Pakistan's Newspaper of Record, and a quote of the blow-by-blow from that paper from the first day.

The Pakistani blogosphere as a whole has been buzzing. One very useful place to see an aggregated feed of major Pakistani blogs is a site called "Bloggers.Pk." It literally is a one-stop shop for the content of Pakistani blogs. (And of course, like all other international news, the Metroblogs for major cities are useful. In this case, Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi.) The team behind Bloggers.Pk is the same one that has been active since the 2005 earthquake and agitating about the censoring and blocking of blogs in Pakistan (it also help run Metblog Karachi). At least part of that team is also involved in an online protest and petition site.

The VOA Urdu Service has actually managed to be part of making some news in this whole sequence of events. Apparently the Federal Law Minister, Wasi Zafar, got into a rather unseemly tirade on the air. And that brings us to the other component of the business of The People's News in the early 21st Century, as that exchange has been making the rounds on YouTube and its sister sites, as well as via email.

Not that the print and broadcast media in Pakistan have been sidelined. In fact, the websites for Dawn, The News, The Daily Times and others have been very much the core of where information has been available. South Asian media in general, and Pakistani newspapers in particular, have acquited themselves well in times of crisis. Really, the only time Dawn, in particular, gets daring is when there is uncertainty in who calls the shots in government--and then it does work that is just short of amazing.

A second sequence of news events related to Pakistan has also been unfolding in the last few days. The first was an op-ed by Benazir Bhutto, "A False Choice for Pakistan," in the Washington Post.

Hard on the heels of that op-ed came this Times of India headline:

Is US ready to dump Mush?
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA
WASHINGTON: The writing seems to be on the wall for Pakistan's military ruler Pervez Musharraf. Uncle Sam, the General's patron-in-chief, is showing signs of cashiering his favoured stooge and preparing grounds for his succession...

It went on to point out that "a spate of articles in the US media pillorying Musharraf has set the tone for a change." Prominent, of course, was America's "Paper of Record", chiming in with an article actually listed under the section title "Wondering" and titled "One Bullet Away from What", the operative point being that the one bullet that might take out the General might not usher in a Pakistan enthusiastically going the way of the Khomeini revolution or the Taliban's Afghanistan.

--Sabahat Ashraf

Comments

[Maariya]

I think this professor needs to research where he heard it's "taboo" for a women to walk around with out their hair covered in Pakistan, has he even been there?

[iFaqeer]

Umm....I wasn't saying that it is. I am saying the opposite: that people--not least at least some in the media, and some folks in India--have that impression. And my point is that this story helps bust that impression wide open. Which has to be, as I said, a good thing.

[Maariya]

My apologies, it just came off sounding that way to me. Sincere apologies.

[Munaeem]

Three options for judicial crisis
According to reports , government is considering three options to tackle the judicial crisis.

1. To reconstitute the Supreme Judicial Council under Justice Rana Bhagwandas to complete trial in accordance with lawyers demand.
2. To wait for the decision of the present SJC and reaction of the public on the decision.
3. To prolong the proceedings of the SJC so that protests subside.