KARACHI:
Justice (retd) Syed Mansoor Ali Shah has, in his recent op-ed in a leading daily, “A Small Republic in Every Classroom”, offered an intellectually stimulating treatise on nurturing democratic temper, critical debate and civic courage within our educational institutions. He eloquently argues that a generation trained to question authority in the classroom will eventually grow up to hold unbridled power to account.
His pedagogical thesis is difficult to quarrel with. Yet the source of this discourse leaves a reflective reader with an unmistakable sense of irony. It is remarkably comfortable to prescribe civic fortitude to twenty-year-olds in university halls when the older generation, including its highest constitutional guardians, has itself struggled to demonstrate that fortitude consistently at moments of institutional crisis.
Exhorting the youth to build democratic resilience in hindsight can resemble lighting a lantern long after the house has caught fire. When the foundations of our constitutional architecture were being steadily undermined, and when independent-minded jurists faced unprecedented institutional isolation, the nation looked to its senior constitutional guardians for assertive and unambiguous leadership, not merely for judicial restraint. Justice Shah ultimately chose resignation after the passage of the 27th Constitutional Amendment, describing it as a grave assault on the Constitution. Yet the larger question remains whether such resistance, however principled, came sufficiently early and forcefully to prevent the erosion that had already taken place.
To urge a generation to question authority is undoubtedly noble. But institutions are not preserved by lessons imparted after the fact. They are preserved when those entrusted with them are themselves willing to question authority when the cost of doing so is highest. When constitutional precedents are displaced, institutional conventions weakened and judicial independence placed under strain, the courage expected from those sitting on the bench cannot be deferred to a later chapter of reflection.
True institutional integrity is forged on the bench in moments of trial, not principally in post-facto commentary from the quiet sanctity of retreat. History rarely remembers those who analyse the darkness after the battery has run out; it remembers those who held the flame when the night was at its darkest.
I conclude with a poetic note by quoting my own qitah, which I conceived when the Supreme Court of Pakistan was, in my view, being undone in its entirety:
Qaba ki fikr na dastaar ka tumhein gham hai
Har ek dar pe kharay ho, sitam yeh kya kam hai
Nizaam-e-adl ke mansab pe baithne waalo
Yeh faislay bhi tumhaare nahin, yahi gham hai
Haroon Rashid Siddiqi
Canada
