For all the defiance of the judiciary that the present government has been guilty of, the Prime Minister’s address at the convocation ceremony of the Islamia University Bahawalpur held on Thursday would stand out for its most unabashed refusal to obey the Supreme Court order to him to write, arguably the most talked about letter in the country, to the Swiss authorities. The letter would ask for the reopening of the cases of graft against Mr Zardari involving a sum of $60 million. It must be recalled that the court had left no ambiguity whatsoever by underlining the exclusive responsibility of the Prime Minister (as Chief Executive) for complying with its directive, as it explicitly decreed that he did so without seeking advice from any quarter. Mr Gilani’s words, “I am Prime Minister, not a peon,” suggest that he took the order as a gesture of humiliation by lowering his status. He virtually threw a challenge to the apex court questioning its jurisdiction and competence to interpret the Constitution when he remarked that the compliance with its verdict would be treason under Article 6, punishable with death. Most blatantly, he ignored the fact that Articles 189 and 190 not only enjoined upon the entire state apparatus, the civil authority as well as the armed forces and all institutions under them, to obey the judicial directives, but also to make sure that  they were carried out. Twisting the underlying logic of the contempt of court for which Mr Gilani stands indicted, he shifted the responsibility for disobedience of the Supreme Court to Parliament taking cover of the presidential immunity clause that it had unanimously decided to incorporate in the basic document of the country, when debating its contents way back in 1973.
The address is a mind-boggling instance of wooing trouble; yet Mr Gilani did not seem to bother. “It’s better to face six months’ imprisonment than face the death sentence,” he observed, demonstrating his loyalty to the PPP as well as President Zardari. He would rather leave politics than ‘stab him in the back’.
The belittling of the highest court in the country by the government is an open invitation to chaos that would plague the country, were other institutions and citizens at large to start treating the courts in a similar manner. The rule of law is a cardinal principle of democracy that the Prime Minister rightly bemoaned was not allowed to flourish in the past in Pakistan. However, for him to say that his government has been promoting democracy simply amounts to deriding the very institution. Nothing could do more disservice to democracy than the attitude of defiance of law that the government is resorting to in order to save the skin of Mr Zardari. Rather than crossing all limits, Mr Gilani should have been thinking in terms of the future of democracy in Pakistan in the larger national interest.