Welcome week

This has been a welcome week. The Senate has unanimously elected its new chairman. The Islamabad High Court has confirmed an anti-terrorist court’s death sentence on Mumtaz Qadri who wilfully assassinated ex-Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer. The Rangers have raided the MQM headquarters at 90 Azizabad in Karachi, arrested wanted terrorists and criminals and unearthed a cache of illegal weapons. Each action is significant and will have interesting consequences.

The election of the PPP’s nominee as Senate chairman was foretold on the basis of the numbers game and steadfast allies like the MQM, ANP, JUI, BNP-A etc. The MQM’s vote was the deciding factor. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made a last ditch effort to woo the MQM when CM Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, called up Altaf Hussain in London and tried unsuccessfully to bridge the bitter gap of fifteen years in fifteen honeyed minutes. It is a measure of the desperation of the Sharifs that they even tried to sway the MQM, considering that the MQM had already announced its decision to rejoin the PPP’s Sindh government and was simply waiting for the Senate elections to roll round in Islamabad in order to extract the best deal for themselves in Karachi. The MQM has no option but to clutch at the PPP for survival in the face of a determined operation by the Rangers, backed to the hilt by GHQ and the federal government, to decimate Karachi’s terrorizing militias in general and the MQM’s militants in particular.

However, it is the nomination of Raza Rabbani that caught the PMLN off guard. Mr Rabbani is known to be a bit of a democratic rebel in the ranks of the PPP—he was twice overlooked for the Senate’s top slot when Mr Zardari put his faith first in Farooq Naek, his personal lawyer, and then in Nayyar Bukhari, the PPP’s stalwart from Islamabad. But Mr Rabbani’s credentials were good with the PMLN with which he had worked amicably cobbling various constitutional amendments proposed by the ruling party. So Mr Zardari has skillfully killed two birds with one stone. He has pushed a party irritant out of the way and also compelled Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to eat humble pie.

Mr Rabbani will not be a pushover for either the PPP or PMLN. This augurs well for democracy. He is expected to steer a neutral ship, neither allowing the government to steamroll controversial legislation nor tilting in favour of any undue negative or delaying tactics by the opposition.

The Islamabad High Court’s decision to uphold the death sentence on Qadri, though belated by four years, is welcome. But it is inexplicable why the court has absolved the murderer of the charge of terrorism on the dubious ground that the act did not create any fear or harassment in society even though the self-confessed murderer publicly claimed he did so in order to intimidate and warn society not to follow in the footsteps of Mr Taseer. In the case of the man who tried to kill Raza Rumi, the brave journalist, for sectarian reasons, the case has been sent to a military anti-terrorist court. The man who tried to kill the ex-CJ of the LHC, Khawaja Sharif, who is now, ironically enough, Qadri’s lawyer, was earlier tried in an anti-terrorist court, sentenced to death and executed. The men who tried to kill ex-President Pervez Musharraf were all tried under anti-terrorist laws and executed. And so on. Now it is learnt that various religious parties are banding together to challenge the judgment in the Supreme Court and offering “blood money” to Taseer’s family. The family has rightly refused the offer and the government should rightly appeal the part of the judgment that removes the tag of terrorism from Qadri because this precedent could seriously erode the very basis of the anti-terrorism laws of the country when it is involved in an existential struggle against various manifestations of terrorism.

The Rangers raid on the MQM’s HQ in Karachi sends a strong signal in the same direction. It also confirms the fact that Altaf Hussain’s political strategy to control Karachi by an armed militia is now being seriously challenged by the military establishment under COAS General Raheel Sharif. This is a radical departure from the Musharraf and Kayani eras when he was some sort of holy cow for the military establishment. Combined with the British government’s pressure on him in London in money laundering and Imran Farooq murder cases, this new situation signals the beginning of the end of Altaf Hussain’s supremacy as the unchallenged leader of the MQM. To add to his woes, the MQM’s vote bank is being seriously eroded by Imran Khan’s PTI and it won’t be easy for the MQM to rig the next elections as in the past.

Slowly, haltingly, Pakistan seems to be on the verge of fashioning a new order that promises to diminish violent religious and ethnic strife, terrorism, civil-military conflict and economic stagnation. We hope this isn’t another false start.