Chaudhry Shujaat deserves to be heard

The abiding craft of Chaudhry Shujaat Husain, president of the PML-Q, displayed during the presidency of General (retd) Musharraf, was cobbling together a platoon of turncoats to run the government. Though he exuded a lugubrious dignity, I could never understand him on the telly, and he invariably came across as incoherent. To top it all, he had a National Assembly speaker whose main mission appeared to be to send repeated planeloads of freeloaders for paid holidays to Geneva. But, in offering himself for trial for supporting President Musharraf’s 2007 emergency, he has not only shown exemplary courage, but also injected a dose of realism and sanity into the inquisition-like hysteria and sordid drama being enacted on the playing field of jurisprudence. His plea is pretty straightforward.

It’s time to amend Article 6 of the Constitution by replacing the words ‘high treason’ with ‘offence against the state’. He also expressed the view that if there was to be a treason trial, the starting point should be October 12, 1999, when an elected government was overthrown while the chief of the army staff was still airborne. Meanwhile, supporters of the prime minister are publicly squirming at what they perceive are deliberate tactics to delay the inevitable.



There is a lot of confusion about the actual meaning of treason. For most fans of the cloak and dagger novels, the word suggested treachery and subversion, and was usually levelled against a national of a country who had been willfully working for an enemy state by involving himself in espionage or betraying his country’s secrets. Like the legendary Mata Hari who was executed by the French for allegedly spying for the Germans in the First World War. Or like William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), who worked for the Nazis as a broadcaster and who in 1946 was the last person to be tried for and convicted of high treason in the United Kingdom.

A law dictionary published in 1983 defined the word as an action to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure, the parent nation. And people who were supposed to have committed treason were referred to as traitors. The term has also been indiscriminately used to describe a person who is accused of betraying his own political party, nation, family, ethnic group, sports team, religion, social class, club and Constitution. Initially, there were two kinds of treason — high treason and petty treason. In the former category, the offender would lose his property to the king, while in the latter, the convicted party would forfeit his property to his lord. In 1823, in England, the distinction was removed and the word treason covered both categories.

Treason apparently covers a wide range of activities, including fleeing from battle, plotting the death of one’s king or lord, and committing adultery with the lord’s wife. It has been used as a slur against political dissidents and as a political epithet regardless of any verifiable treasonable action. In fact, the core aspect of treason was, and still is, betrayal. For the orthodox Christians, Judas was the ultimate betrayer. And on our own patch of earth, “Any person who abrogates or attempts or conspires to abrogate, subverts or attempts or conspires to subvert the Constitution by use of force or show of force or by other unconstitutional means shall be guilty of high treason” (Article 6, point 1). It is obvious that the emphasis is on preserving the democratic system of government and discouraging unlawful takeovers. However, all that Chaudhry Shujaat is requesting is a little reflection. He deserves to be heard.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 12^th, 2014.

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