The Lawyers’ Crusade

AITZAZ AHSAN, de facto leader of the lawyers’ protests, at a rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. More Photos >

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By JAMES TRAUB
Published: June 1, 2008

In April, on the highway outside the little Punjabi town of Renala Khurd, Aitzaz Ahsan was waylaid by a crowd of seemingly deranged lawyers. The advocates, who wore black suits, white shirts and black ties, were not actually insane; they just seemed that way because they were so overcome with excitement at greeting the mastermind of Pakistan’s lawyers’ movement, perhaps the most consequential outpouring of liberal, democratic energy in the Islamic world in recent years. The 62-year-old Ahsan was on his way to address the bar association of Okara, 10 miles away, but the lawyers, and the farmers and shopkeepers gathered with them, were not about to let him leave. They boiled around the car, shouting slogans. “Who should our leaders be like?” they cried. “Like Aitzaz!” And, “How many are prepared to die for you?” “Countless! Countless!”
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Pakistan’s Judicial Crisis Unfolds

Pakistan’s lawyers were not, in fact, courting martyrdom, but their willingness to stand up for their convictions, and to suffer for them, has transformed their country’s legal and political landscape. After Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, demanded the resignation of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, in March of last year, the lawyers boycotted the courts and held massive rallies across the country. The movement was managed by a small group led by Ahsan, a prominent legislator and one of Pakistan’s leading constitutional lawyers. Ahsan also took Chaudhry on as a client, and last July persuaded the Supreme Court to restore Chaudhry to the bench — an astonishing rebuke to Musharraf.

Pakistan, the lawyers’ movement and Ahsan have been through a great deal since then. Early last November, Musharraf declared martial law, deposing Chaudhry and 60 other judges and putting Ahsan and thousands of other lawyers into prison or under house arrest. The assassination of the popular opposition leader Benazir Bhutto seemed to leave the field clear for Musharraf to reassert his dominance. But in February of this year Musharraf’s party was routed in parliamentary elections, and Ahsan and his colleagues resumed agitating for the restoration of Chaudhry and the other judges. That’s what he was doing in Okara in April: keeping the heat not only on Musharraf but also on the new civilian government, some of whose members seemed less than happy at the prospect of a truly independent judiciary.

In fact, a man who had done so much to restore democratic government to Pakistan was now threatening the new, elected regime — in the name of democracy. What’s more, Ahsan was pointing the weapon of popular agitation at his own political party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, whose leader, Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, was dragging his feet on the restoration of the judiciary. The lawyers themselves were talking about a coming “train wreck”; so were nervous P.P.P. officials. But Ahsan was unfazed. “You can’t have a democracy without an independent judiciary,” he told me in one of a series of conversations across Pakistan earlier this year. “And you can certainly not construct a parliamentary structure on the debris of the judicial edifice.” Over the ensuing weeks, Zardari made and unmade a series of promises to restore the judges. A few weeks ago, Ahsan and the country’s lawyers voted to go back to the streets.

Pakistan has all the accouterments of democracy with, at least until recently, very few of the habits of thought or behavior upon which democracy depends. Along with India, from whose territory it was carved out in 1947, Pakistan inherited the English institutions of law, parliament, civil service and the like; judges even wore powdered wigs until about 30 years ago. But something went wrong from the very start. The scholar Stephen P. Cohen writes in his 2004 book, “The Idea of Pakistan,” that the country was conceived as a fortress or refuge from Hindu domination in India, putting security before individual rights. The “key power players,” Cohen argues, including the army, the bureaucrats and the political left, “wished Pakistan to be democratic, but they were not willing to make it so.” Other factions, including feudal landlords and Islamists, did not even wish it to be democratic.

But since Pakistan had a constitution, a judiciary, a parliament and an electoral commission, the country’s military rulers felt compelled to engage in a democratic dumb show, and they rarely failed to secure the active collaboration of the judiciary. When Gen. Ayub Khan overthrew a civilian government and annulled the constitution in 1958, the Supreme Court endorsed the act as a matter of “revolutionary legality.” In 1962, Khan promulgated a new constitution, which transferred many powers to himself as president. In the years to come, the courts would find rationales for superseding constitutions and for rigged elections and referendums; judges would actively collude with military officials against the political parties. A report by the International Crisis Group, which monitors conflict areas, describes Pakistan’s constitutional history as “a series of elaborate jurisprudential efforts to vindicate and facilitate military interventions into democratic politics.”