By the time you read this, you would have read multiple interpretations of the Supreme Court’s judgment yesterday that did away with the lifetime ban for politicians seeking to run for any legislative assembly.
With the current political climate as charged as it is, many readers, specially those supporting the down-on-its-luck PTI, will allege that the decision is only to facilitate the PML(N) chief, former PM Nawaz Sharif and the leader of the PTI’s friend-turned-foe Jehangir Tareen, who heads a party of his own now. It is common in Pakistan to view developments through such a narrow lens, specially since some parties, depending on whether or not they have fallen out of favour with the powers that be.
The larger issue, of course, is that of how to deal with flimsy bits of legislation that were put in by dictators, with a clear intention of throwing a spanner in the works of the democratic process. Matter are made even more complicated by members of the judiciary who interpret an already problematic law in about the most maximalist way possible.
Rejecting a previous judgment, the apex judiciary he interpretation of Article 62(1)(f) of the Constitution in imposing a lifetime disqualification upon a person through an implied declaration of a court of civil jurisdiction while adjudicating upon some civil rights and obligations of the parties is beyond the scope of the said Article and amounts to reading into the Constitution.
We’ve a wounded constitution on our hands, amended into bloody submission by military dictators, and then this destructive spree aided by giddy, overeager members of the judiciary. That has led to situations like these, where rapists, murderers and arsonists simply serve out a sentence, after what the people have deemed is their debt to society, while representatives of the people, put away on flimsy cases like not declaring the salary they have gotten from their family members, or procedural irregularities in the buying and selling of state gifts, are declared ineligible to run for office, for life.
