The Creator says in verse 5:8 of Al-Maa’idah.
“Believers, fulfill your duties to Allah and bear true witness. Do not allow your hatred for other men turn you away from justice. Deal Justly: that will bring you closer to piety. Have fear of Allah; Allah is cognizant of all your actions.”
By the same token, never love anyone so much that you cannot do justice. Never support anyone to such an extent (primarily for self-interest) that you cannot do justice. Never be so vulnerable to pressures, threats and greed that you cannot do justice. Be scared of your Creator. Love only your Creator and humanity, His greatest creations, his jewel. Little else matters. The best way to affirm you Faith in the Creator is by meting our justice.
Now let’s hear Fredric Bastiat: “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
This then is Pakistan’s status quo. It is enshrined in its constitution. This is precisely the hole we are trapped in. It won’t be easy to climb out of it; instead we keep digging the hole deeper by being mentally enslaved to western and alien concepts, not our own. It will require massive collective effort led by society, by the judiciary and the media. But all others, like business big and small, agriculturists, academics, genuine scholars both of the spiritual and secular kind, will also have to play their part. It will be no less than a classic revolution and every nation – provided it is a nation – has it in it to do so once the tipping point has to come.
Today it is the Supreme Court that holds the teetering balance of Pakistan’s future in its hands, not just of leadership change but making the revolution in one fell swoop of a judgment. Let’s hope and pray they have justice in their hearts, not just mundane laws and legalism made by a group of plunderers. Law can often be an ass. They will if they are real Muslims and I am no one to judge. No one is; only the Creator knows what is in men’s hearts.
I don’t want to get into the minutiae of the case because it is still ongoing and that is wrong. Suffice it to repeat: we are expecting justice based on sensible laws, not laws made by self-serving plunderers who have made justice their handmaiden. We are tired of unjust judgments based on asinine laws, crutches for ducking justice.
I don’t know how the minds of the judges are developing, not even from their remarks and questions, but they would — or at leash should — know that they hold the future course of Pakistan’s destiny in their hands. Will it become a state based on rule of law or a state based on might is right, the law of the jungle? Will it be a judgment that kick starts the process of systemic change for the better or will it just maintain the man-eating status quo? If it is change for the better it can take time, but it can start. Such change can also be brought about with the stroke of pen but better would be change with consensus for it to be everlasting, one that enables people to choose governments that regularly and significantly deliver and improve the human condition starting from the poorest. No longer do we want dictators in ‘democrats’ clothing. They are the most dangerous kind and all our laws, including our basic law, is made or aped by them. Some illiterate-educated might call it a dream, but poor chaps, they don’t know that dreams are the stuff reality is made of. Every harbinger of change, including prophets and messengers of God, were initially called ‘dreamers’ but they revolutions and changed the world.
Neither do I know how the prime minister’s mind is working, despite the near-daily screams of his shameless courtiers and courtesans outside the Supreme Court and on media. Yet they sound more and more like a beaten people, screaming irrelevance. Best that he resigns and save us all this embarrassment and pain.
Like his beloved mercifully odious former chief justice, the prime minister has thrown his children, mother and wife to the wolves to escape their pack. Is this how his mind works? Even animals don’t do that. All the love letters of Qatri princes, nor the gifts of horses from Pakistan, help when the Moving Finger starts writing and writes on.
I have this notion that our prime minister is depending on the Indian prime minister’s forthcoming official visit to the United States during which high on his agenda will be to convince Donald Trump, who considers Nawaz Sharif as in irrelevance, that he must be saved for both their sakes. Never will they find such a well-trained and pliable underling.
Trump would have been told that in about two years Pakistan will need about $100 billion to save itself from going belly up or it will not be able to pay for its debt servicing, its fiscal and trade deficits and its decline in remittances, pay salaries and what have you. America will then ask for a quid pro quo: denuclearize no questions asked, delink with China and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, give us the Gwadar Port, stop establishing coal-based power plants that will pollute the environment further, forget the developing China-Russia-Pakistan nexus, forget Kashmir and accept India’s hegemony over South Asia. Ready for that you ‘sovereign’ country?
Fate-changing moments come but rarely. We have one before us. If the Supreme Court and we let it pass, we are doomed. If we grasp it, we will find real independence for the second time. Not many countries get that. The Supreme Court has a great opportunity to redeem itself from its sins past else like Macbeth’s wife it will forever be washing its hands … “out, out you damned spot”.
They can atone for their part in enabling the judicial murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; for legitimizing usurper after usurper; for not supporting their Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah when a rampant Nawaz Sharif and attacked the Supreme Court building; for supporting an odious and corrupt chief justice when he was rightly sacked and making Pakistan pay the price with his jumbo jet-sized ego, bad judgments and trying to hide his corruption by hiding behind his incompetent son. One can go on adding to this list. No point. Redeem yourselves you five judges, save Pakistan and book your place in Heaven.
The judges and the wolves are informed. The Moving Finger knows and has started writing. Whose fate is it writing? Nawaz Sharif’s or Pakistan’s.