PAKISTAN'S INTERNAL TURMOIL: INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

Just when Pakistan seemed set on a linear course with Prime Minister Imran Khan giving a three-year extension to the chief of army staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa in August, the Supreme Court upset the course by striking down the order.

Apart from finding procedural defi ciencies in the order granting Bajwa a three-year extension, the court raised more fundamental questions about the legal and constitutional provisions by which the extension to the army chief was being granted.

Technicalities apart, T C A Raghavan (retired diplomat and currently Director-General of the Indian Council of World Affairs) writes “the Supreme Court’s point was that in the extant regulations, there was no specific provision providing for the reappointment or extension of the army chief’s service tenure. The court’s final order, giving Bajwa a six-month extension, avoided precipitating an immediate crisis. The government was also directed to pass legislation to govern tenure and extensions of the army chief within this six-month period.

“Given the long tenures in post- 1971 Pakistan of Zia-ul-Haq (1976- 88), Pervez Musharraf (1998-2007) and Kayani (2007-2013), it is legitimate to wonder what was being missed here. Evidently, the court is now a different institution and the old civil-military tangles thus have a new ingredient in them……….

“The Supreme Court has historically acted as an adjunct to Pakistan’s bureaucratic and military elite from the 1950s. Its legitimization of different spells of military rule using dubious legal principles from ancient Rome and English common law had facilitated multiple dictatorships. One chief justice had thus cited the maxim, ‘that which is otherwise not lawful is made lawful by necessity’…………”