The leftists and progressive nationalists warned on Friday that the edifice of parliamentary democracy faced an existential threat and without a robust and uninterrupted political process, the state and society would not be able to survive the ongoing crisis.
They were speaking at a seminar entitled ‘Democracy Besieged’, organised by leftists and progressive nationalists at the National Press Club. The seminar was attended by a large number of political workers, students, intellectuals and trade unionists. They passed a unanimous resolution demanding that the higher judiciary and military establishment recognise the supremacy of the parliament and refrain from any steps that would unhinge the political process.
IA Rahman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said that in the recent months, a new power game had taken shape in which the military establishment and the superior judiciary were seeking to emasculate the parliament, with the tacit support of the corporate media. The rhetoric of ‘corruption’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘rule of law’ was being employed to delegitimise the elected regime, with a host of politically motivated court cases, including NRO and memogate, to exert pressure.
Rahman said that the parliament was being exclusively blamed for the persistence and worsening of long-term structural problems of energy, economic hardships and the deteriorating quality of public services. The implication of it was that the vast majority of the Pakistani people wanted an end to the current democratic government, for ‘clean’ and ‘efficient’ alternatives. In fact the public discourse was being manipulated and hard-won political freedoms were in the danger of being subverted, he added.
Noted scholar and analyst Dr Ayesha Siddiqa said that Pakistan faced a number of potential futures depending on whether the political process was allowed to thrive or was suffocated. She said that the power of the military establishment could only be gradually reduced if diversity was promoted through a representative parliament and other institutions such as the media and the educational institutions. For this to happen, all political parties must develop a consensus that relations with the neighbouring countries must be normalised and the patronage of the religious militancy must stop, she added.
Aasim Sajjad of the Worker’s Party said that the backdrop for the restoration of democracy was a street movement featuring the Supreme Court chief justice and rhetoric that proclaimed the end of the ‘doctrine of necessity’.
However, he noted, that the subsequent developments have indicated that the superior judiciary, instead of strengthening the edifice of parliamentary democracy, was instead asserting a new interventionist role that was subjecting the weak democratic structure to new pressures. He emphasised that the Supreme Court had been extremely biased in choosing which issues to bring into its purview, with the military in particular, notably exempt from any judicial scrutiny. He pointed in particular to the intelligence agencies’ conduct in Balochistan.
