Along with the legal centre of power, we have "invisible governments" supposedly in competition as well as in contradiction, with the real one. Also, we operate our lives under civil law, the Islamic Sharia as well as Martial Law edicts masquerading in the form of the 8^th Amendment. Add to this the tribal Law of "Jirga" and also the duality of Civil Law in the form of Special Courts. On top of this is the arbitrary exercise of Presidential ordinances and decree, acting as a substitute of legislation in Parliament. These multiple layers of law are sufficient to create a considerable deal of confusion in any society. In our case, they have psychologically contributed to induce certain contempt or disdain for the supremacy of the rule of law. (A man with many wives loves and respects both wives and women in general, less) As a result the harsher elements of law are reserved for the poor and less fortunate segments of society. The rest get away with blue murder and laugh all the way to the bank.

No military adventurer was ever punished for repeated assaults on civil society. No politician or bureaucrat was ever penalised for systematically looting the meagre resources of this impoverished land. Not a single head rolled when the state of Pakistan suffered the death-blow of dismemberment in 1971. (Successive governments did not dare even to publish the findings of the Hamood-ur-Rehman Commission). No one saw the inside of a prison for abject surrender and defeat in wars with India. Nobody was held accountable, or even censured, for murdering the first elected Prime Minister of this country. (Not to mention the assassination of Premier Liaquat Ali Khan). Attempts were even made to raise cowardly traitors like General "Tiger" Niazi and General Zia to the level of national heroes.

Clearly, the contempt for law permeated in our ruling classes an element of political schizophrenia, which, in turn, placed a high premium on the politics of expediency. The legal anarchy that emerged from a multiplicity of laws, and the political expediency that it generated, has not only combined to create a nation of "Lotas" but it has also had a devastating effect on the process of institution building. The mainsprings of any society’s democratic foundation are the institutions that it nourishes. These institutions of state are The President as Head of State; the Prime Minister as Head of Government; the Judiciary; Parliament. When these state institutions fall into irreconcilable discord, concommittedly most often, with the distribution of authority among them having come to conflict, most societies degenerate into fratricidal upheaval and civil war. It was the refusal of the West Pakistan dominated military, for instance, to accept the sovereign authority of a Bengali dominated parliament that acted as a catalyst to the Civil War in East Pakistan in March 1971. The most alarming aspect of political crises in Pakistan today in not that our state institutions have automatically come into conflict with each other, but that a deliberate effort is being made by the government to do precisely that. Benazir’s government is creating contradiction between the authority of different state institutions as a matter of policy. To cite just two examples:

1. After the unceremonious debacle of her first government, Benazir was instrumental in pushing through the National Assembly a law (Article 90) that would make it mandatory on the Speaker to ensure that any detained legislator is summoned from prison to attend parliamentary proceedings. She vigorously pursued and got adopted this law primarily, and perhaps exclusively, for the benefit of detained MNA Asif Ali Zardari. (To his credit Nawaz Sharif’s government had honoured this provision of law, enabling Mr. Zardari to spend most of his "jail term" in the leafy suburbs of Islamabad). However, after her second coming to power, she decreed that it was not the prerogative of the National Assembly Speaker to summon imprisoned members, but that such a ruling would have to come from the Judiciary. That by then her government had already started to bludgeon the Courts was ominous, not because of the fact that it violated the privileges of the members of the National Assembly, privileges she herself had fought to codify into law and from which she had benefited in opposition, but because she wanted to pit the Judiciary into a meaningless confrontation with the Parliament. Benazir was creating state-sponsored strife. The Parliament is an institution of State and so is the Judiciary. To deliberately bring into contradiction the authority of one against the other is tantamount to engineering anarchy within the state. And this is official policy in BB’s second misadventure with government.

2. The same doctrine was pursued with naivety bordering on the absurd, in the course of the current brinkmanship with the Judiciary. The government, a pillar of state authority, first scorned and belittled the judiciary (another component of state power) for its March 1996 ruling. Then the Presidency, another bulwark of state authority, was made to engage the superior judiciary in a bizarre reference, which the Court rejected because the Presidents signature was absent. The damage, however, was done. The government had manoeuvred to bring into discord the office of the President and the Supreme Court of Pakistan. It had conspired to create antagonism between these two pillars of state. While promoting state sponsored strife the Prime Minister has been creating conditions that in a less patient country would have degenerated into civil war.

The tragic flaw in the Prime Minister is not that the administration gets increasingly overwhelmed by her ineptitude but that, on the contrary, she fancies herself to be master strategist. Here she is a latter day Machiavelli, grossly exaggerating her own concept of her manipulative abilities. As far as she is concerned good fortune and fate have conspired to confirm the perception of political genius where precious little if any such promise exists. "The fact that a prince who wants to act virtuously in every way." Wrote Machiavelli, "necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous." In other words a prince must learn how not to be necessarily good. The Prime Minister seems to have stumbled on to this maxim by default. Her image of herself as a great manipulator, of one who by instinct practices the finer elements of the policy of divide and rule has been realised----her second government being proof----more accident than by design.

Not Machiavellian in its political philosophy, her government is in practice one of greedy, thieving opportunists. Avarice is the driving force of this regime.

There is no "good" or virtue left for any prince or princess in the government to do or, rather, as Machiavelli admonishes, try not to. Favour can only be withheld if some good is known to exist in the first place. Where there is no reasonable promise of virtue it is an exercise in futility to try to be fussy. In international relations the power to hurt is bargaining power, to exploit is diplomacy. In domestic terms this applies equally to the trader as to the politician. A government can influence its populace for a desired purpose by employing this power to hurt and, hence by not being "good". Once that purpose is achieved it can revert back to its benign self, its power having been demonstrated and reconfirmed. But a bad government incapable of any virtue to start with, has not such options. Machiavelli wrote of a prince’s, sternness in this sense. Not that anyone in this bogus government is interested in anything more than a superficial understanding of Machiavelli and some of the conventional morality that appear in his writings.

On August 14, 1996 on Pakistan’s 49^th Independence anniversary, the Prime Minister addressed the nation: "Government is comprised of three organs. They are the executive, legislature, and judiciary. While they are three separate organs of government(sic), they are all part of one government. And the head of that organ is the Chief Executive". This would be naives stuff coming from a first year student of politics in a quasi-democratic Third World type of University.

Coming as it does, from a twice elected head of government is, at best, scandalous. Executive, Judiciary and Legislature are three different organs of State and not of government. The Prime Minister is merely Chief Executive, (Head of Government) and, hence, boss of that one pillar of state. The custodian of the other two pillars of state are the Chief Justice of the supreme Court and the Speaker of the National Assembly. For a country in which the Prime Minister cannot even recognise this elementary fact it is no wonder that our nation is suffering the penalties of state sponsored strife. Political stability cannot exist when the source of authority is deliberately challenged and the distribution of power is not even properly understood.

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