It was a powerful press conference, that of PTI Senator Azam Swati. The legislator, who was arrested earlier this month in a case registered against him over a controversial tweet thought to be against the armed forces, gave out some disturbing details regarding the treatment that was meted out to him. A couple of days prior to this, he had named two military officers that he had held responsible for his mistreatment. This time, he went to the extent of calling upon the military chief himself to facilitate the investigation.
In rhetorical exercise, he waved a copy of the constitution and said that it does not apply to “at least 1000 people.”
He is absolutely right, of course. The way elements within the deep state operate with impunity isn’t even an open secret anymore; it is acknowledged even by those sections of the political spectrum that are receiving the benevolence of the aforementioned.
If a septuagenarian Senator was treated this way, allegedly stripped naked and beaten, what hope do the rest of the nation’s hapless citizens have?
In the words of Victor Hugo: nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. That idea, in Pakistan, is that the deep state has to operate within its legally defined limit and not exceed it regardless of how the elected representatives of the people are running the country. That their clash with the latter can come only in the form of a refusal to obey illegal orders, nothing else.
But for those reasonable demands, on which the entire political class now agrees, to be realised, there needs to be unity and a need to bury the hatchet at least for the moment. The PDM needs to stop reading out the list of injustices it certainly suffered at the hands of these same forces everytime they are held accountable for the same today. Similarly, to engender such a esprit de corps amongst the political class, the PTI needs to acknowledge its own acquiescence to similar actions when it was in government.
An example of this last bit should be the Senator under question himself. The man had openly called for the arrest of former premier Nawaz Sharif when he had made a statement similar to his own.
The more things change, the more they stay the same…
