Pakistan Army Chief, General Pervez Musharraf, has proclaimed a State of Emergency that is only a tad short of Martial Law. This is his second coup in eight years. In this proclamation he has suspended the badly mauled Constitution of Pakistan with a view to issuing a Provisional Constitutional Order (another name for a new Legal Framework Order). Provisions of his Emergency proclamation give the President of Pakistan (himself) the power to amend the Constitution from time to time, as the need may arise.

A countrywide crackdown on opposition leaders and the leaders of the lawyers’ movement has been launched. Many people have already been arrested in many towns and more are likely to be in the next few days. 

Although the proclamation of Emergency has many paragraphs beginning with “whereas this is so” and “whereas that is so”, the real need of the second coup was to deal with Musharraf’s four or five “enemies”: first was the Chief Justice of Pakistan and the judicial activism he has introduced that has made all the High Courts and the Supreme Court much too independent and troublesome for the military ruler.

The second “enemy” is the freedom of the media, including the press. The government has been perturbed because one of its claim to respectability was that it has permitted an uncommon degree of freedom to the media that has never happened before in Pakistan.

This is partly true. But going back on that is going to be a difficult operation, although it has been undertaken; TV news channels are off the screen in all parts of Pakistan at the time of writing on Sunday. Equipment of one channel, known as Aaj, in Islamabad has been taken away. The newsmen and newspapers have neither been muzzled yet nor any newsman arrested so far.

The third “enemy” is opposition political leaders and they are being picked up wherever they are to be found; many have gone underground. But it is a large-scale crackdown. For the rest, there are many “whereas” paragraphs detailing why the step had become unavoidable.

But these are excuses because they all deal with terrorists striking in many parts of the country at will. He was the Army Chief, with all the powers he needed after forcing the changes in the Constitution he thought he needed, to fight the evils he had in mind. What is new?

The extremists and terrorists are held to be an evil by most opponents and the civil society, many of whom have been picked up. And what new forces can he unleash on the Islamic extremists and other terrorists?

Insofar as Musharraf’s action on Saturday is concerned, two telltale events took place. One was the publication of the various proclamations and orders by the Army Chief as well as the President, including amendments in the laws dealing with media and the press; this was needed to start the crackdown. The chief victim of the crackdown was, of course, the Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

He was picked up from the Supreme Court where he was sitting on a holiday, was escorted home and put under house arrest. This is his second house arrest, the first being in March last that started a countrywide protest movement by lawyers that forced Musharraf to backdown and promise to obey all SC edicts.

The CJP was reinstated, strengthening the judiciary no end. Musharraf’s second Provisional Constitutional Order suppresses all fundamental rights of all Pakistanis and the courts’ jurisdiction to give relief to individuals has been taken away.

The second event was that seven judges, who were later sacked, sat on a Saturday in the Supreme Court and took up an application by chief leader of the lawyers’ movement Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan.

The application requested the SC to prohibit and prevent the Army Chief, Corps Commanders and other government functionaries from following the illegal orders flowing from the so-called legal instruments being issued by the Chief of Army Staff. The SC order on this application was given to newsmen collected outside the Court who ran and splashed it. The order also declared the PCO and State of Emergency and all that flowed from it as “unconstitutional” and legally “void”.

But what happened was that the General moved. He sacked God knows how many superior judges of the Supreme Court and the provincial High Courts and appointed many new ones. It was a grand operation in which the PCOs specified that all the sitting judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts would take fresh oath of allegiance under this PCO. Those who are not invited to take the oath would cease to be judges and will not perform any judicial functions. Supreme Court and High Courts have thus been packed.

PPP Chief Benazir Bhutto who had gone out in the morning dashed back to Pakistan in the evening and said that she would struggle against the Emergency and for democracy. Most people think that she is being forced on Musharraf by United States and other NATO powers.

Let’s see how she behaves because her mandate from the NATO powers is to strengthen the hands of General Musharraf for fighting Islamic extremism better.

As for other political parties, civil society, media and the lawyers community, how will they behave is the question. It is too early to say what the true reaction of the nation would be. Optimists are forecasting an immediate start of an unfocused but continued protests.