Traditionally we do not believe in
self and national accountability. We keep playing loose balls allowing our
issues to deteriorate, that’s why we now have a bad economy and a price hike at
the cost of the life of a common man. The common man is getting unruly and is
taking the law in his own hands, whereas the ruling elite in Pakistan is
paralysed since forever.
Some heads from the government must
roll; who have not been able to protect the life and property of the innocent.
Our system is being run by a faulty system which actually looks like ad-hoc
arrangements to manage day to day affairs and there is no inbuilt system to
have security for the government or it’s public.
There is no check on the role of
law and the most violated legislation is the rule of law which is not followed
by almost all segments of society. The sense of insecurity is one of the major
reasons that we are left behind many nations.
The political system always has
faced removals in the dark night. It is sad to note that in Pakistan, not a
single prime minister has been able to complete his tenure since the country’s
inception 70 years ago. History has been repeating itself time and again.
Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaqat
Ali Khan was murdered in Rawalpindi on October 16, 1951 while the second PM
Khawaja Nazimuddin was sent home by Governor General Ghulam Muhammad on April
17, 1953. Nazimuddin sought justice from the Supreme Court when justice Munir
came up with the doctrine of necessity to validate Ghulam Muhammad’s illegal act.
Muhammad Ali Bogra too was dismissed by Ghulam Muhammad in 1954 but later was
again appointed as PM. Governor General Iskender Mirza dismissed his government
in 1955 as he did not enjoy a majority in the Constituent Assembly.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto rose to power
as President after 13 years of martial law under a special arrangement till the
1973 Constitution was passed. He resigned as president after the constitution
was passed, to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan. He went into elections in
1977 and became the first democratically elected PM, but he was too deposed the
same year through a military coup by General Muhammad Ziaul Haq in July 1977.
Benazir Bhutto came into power as
PM as a result of the 1988 general elections. President Ghulam Ishaq Khan used
his presidential powers under article 58 2(b) and overthrew Bibi’s government
on August 6, 1990.
Then Mian Nawaz Sharif became PM
for the first time in 1990—soon his government too was dismissed by President
Ghulam Ishaq Khan in 1993. But it was restored later upon his appeal to the
Supreme Court. However, this brought in an open political confrontation between
the President and the PM; the famous Kakar formula came into play when the then
Army Chief Waheed Kakar appointed a caretaker government by intervening out of
“doctrine of necessity” for the sake of national security. He forced both Mian
Nawaz Sharif and Ghulam Ishaq Khan to resign on July 18, 1993.
After winning 1993 general
elections overseen by the caretaker Government, Ms Benazir Bhutto became PM of
Pakistan again in 1993 but her second government also could not survive more
than the last three years. Her own hand picked, ‘loyal’ president Farooq
Laghari conspired against her and dismissed her government in November 1996.
As a result of the February 1997
election, Mian Nawaz Sharif again became the PM of Pakistan but on October 12,
1999, General Pervez Musharraf led a military coup and imposed emergency in the
country and toppled Nawaz Sharif’s government.
After the unfortunate death and
murder of Benazir Bhutto, PPP succeeded to secure a majority in the National
Assembly during the 2008 general elections and Yusuf Raza Gilani was elected
the PM. Everything was going well until he was convicted in a contempt of court
case in the Supreme Court for not writing a letter against the sitting
president Asif Ali Zardari to the Swiss authorities to reopen corruption cases.
Mian Nawaz Sharif became the PM for
the third time in 2013 but as he entered the last year of his tenure, he got
engulfed in the Panama corruption scandal, hence SC dismissed his government.
This saga of the above leaders’
fall from grace shows how fragile democracy is in this country and it looks
like there is some major default in our system which we have not been able to
rectify. We left the system floating without fixing it properly which should
manage the country fault-free, where rule of law has respect and power to
sustain the internal and external pressures.
We need to look into the present
system critically with the view to give to the country by giving it a system
which can make Pakistan a prosperous and a modern country, better than even
Turkey and China. Successive interruptions and individual-based constitutional
amendments have made our system fragile and weak therefore, we need to make it
stronger to cater our growing constitutional, administrative and economic
needs.
The nation needs to get out of
adhoc-ism, ethnicity and religious extremism, otherwise we will become hostages
in the hands of a few extremists. The federal government needs to wake up and
use the power of state laws.
The article was published in 'The Nation' on April 14, 2021, link to the original article: https://nation.com.pk/14-Apr-2021/no-accountability-and-hungry-masses
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