Good choice

Legal, not political

There is an expression, peculiar to American sports, regarding powerhouse players: give him the ball and get out of the way. With certain players, that just seems to be the best strategy a team’s management can employ.

The government has decided to give Aitzaz Ahsan the ball. And just the way the laws of physics seem to suspend themselves for exceptional athletes, the whole dynamic of the game will change now that ace lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan has entered the fray. This is not just a comment on his skills as a lawyer; would it, if it were that simple. For the outgoing Babar Awan, though not of Mr Ahsan’s calibre, was not a lightweight either. His grasp of the law has not been found lacking during the course of his rather public career. It was just that there was no love lost between him and the judiciary. The odds, yes, were stacked against him, what with him defending the incumbent government, but he also made no attempts to mend fences with the apex court either. When, for instance, the court finally slapped a contempt notice on him after a particularly caustic press conference of his, Mr Awan chose to respond, not with some affirmation of respect for the court but with lines from a hit seraiki pop ditty. The media lapped it up; the court, predictably, was not amused.

With Mr Ahsan, however, the court has an entirely different relationship. He was president of the highest liaison body between bar and bench during a most critical part of the lawyers movement. He was the then deposed chief justice’s counsel, confidante and, occasionally, chauffer. The opposition PML(N) is said to have offered him an electoral ticket from an “electricity-pole electing” League constituency in Lahore; the populist PTI is said to have pulled out all the stops in trying to woo him over. Mr Ahsan, however, won’t budge from the PPP, even though his conciliatory attitude with the judiciary strained his relations with his party.

If his appointment as the PM’s counsel is indicative of the government wanting to take a conciliatory attitude with the courts, his line about the issue of the letter to the Swiss authorities, also, remains unchanged: the government should send it as that is what the honourable court has ordered. The premier, however, is not guilty of contempt, he says, and that is what he is going to plead in the court.

As opposed to trying to resolve the issue through political means, like press conferences and what-have-you, it seems the government has finally wisened up to trying to solve it through legal means.