Can Aitzaz pull the chestnut out of the fire?

Govt, allies feel Aitzaz Ahsan will somehow protect Gilani from being sentenced under contempt of court charges.

Benches associated with the ruling coalition in the National Assembly remained at full capacity for the last two days. After the hiring of Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan to appear in defence of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani before the Supreme Court, the same benches seemed nearly-deserted Wednesday evening.

The government and its allies instinctively feel that the brilliant lawyer from Lahore will somehow protect Gilani from being sentenced under contempt of court charges. So it’s time to relax and stay put in the cozy comfort of your home.

Without feeling too motivated for or against this prime minister, the Aitzaz-driven sense of security among the government benches forced me to ponder over a serious question: Will our fiercely independent judiciary allow the public to develop the feeling that petitioners before it should feel more secure if a peculiar set of lawyers were found pleading for them? Both the highly talented Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan and the Supreme Court judges will surely hate generating such a feeling.

But perceptions are far more important than reality in a political environment, frighteningly polarised such as the one we are enduring these days.

The self-serving sense of security since acquiring the services of Aitzaz failed to silence ominous whispers, though. More than a dozen active reporters and some opposition legislators kept telling me at Parliament House that Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani would go to the Supreme Court Thursday morning after tendering resignation from his office. Passionately peddling the said claim, they never cared to consider that if quitting office appeared as the only option for Gilani, he would not have engaged Aitzaz Ahsan.

Although a PPP veteran, Aitzaz had mostly been feeling sidelined by his leaders since the murder of Ms Bhutto in December 2007. Only around four months ago did he start getting the feel of being wooed back by none other than President Zardari. When Ejaz Butt’s contract as Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board had expired, the president invited him with Ms Bushra Aitzaz for an exclusive dinner.

Zardari did everything to convince the lawyer during that dinner to take control of the board to revive cricket in Pakistan. Aitzaz is almost mesmerising when talking for or against any issue. Yet, at the said dinner, he found it too hard to find appropriate words to say ‘no’ to the president and ended up strongly pushing the name of former star-batsman Majid Khan for the same position. The warmth between him and the president has continued deepening since then. Zardari brought this out in public and that, too, on a solemn occasion.

On the fourth anniversary of Ms Bhutto’s murder, President was addressing a big crowd of the PPP loyalists in Naudero, but he finished his speech in the middle after noticing the presence of Aitzaz and requested him to ‘appropriately remember’ his leader with passionate rhetoric. We should not be surprised if the new-found love for Aitzaz Ahsan also gets reflected in his selection as the senate chairman. Farooq Naik could have continued in the said office, but his ‘loyalty’ was made to appear ‘suspect,’ where it really matters, by some regular visitors to the President’s office, when Naik was sitting there during the treatment of Zardari at a hospital in Dubai.

The reliance on Aitzaz also suggests in clear terms that the Zardari-Gilani government will employ all tricks available to politicians stuck in dire straits to somehow reach the first week of March 2012, when the PPP looks certain to establish itself as the single-largest party in the upper house of Parliament. The objective seems attainable if you only focus on this government’s problems with the superior judiciary.

Far more threatening and mostly hidden from the public eye, however, remain the issues the Zardari-Gilani government has been developing with the praetorian elite. Things began turning tense with the explosion of Memogate. The different positions that the political and the military leaders took on this scandal before the Supreme Court brought these tensions out in public domain. With the clear intent of telling the world about “who calls the shots in Pakistan”, Gilani felt the compulsion to sack the defense secretary in haste and in an unceremonious manner. Digesting the said sacking quietly is no more possible for the praetorian elite. The sacked secretary has now gone to the Islamabad High Court.

Yet some pragmatic operators of the Zardari-Gilani government continue to brainstorm for a win-win solution, much before the court decides on the matter, one way or the other.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 19^th, 2012.