States of exception: what the Constitution, 3 court rulings and 50 years say about the KP emergency

‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,’ wrote the notorious German thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922. Or, put simply, whoever gets to decide when the rules stop applying is the one actually in charge.

Gifted with a big brain and sharp turn of phrase, Mr Schmitt went on to become a noted critic of parliament, constitutionalism, and liberal democracy. For a time, the age was also his: in the ‘20s back then, much like the ‘20s now, such subjects had fallen out of fashion.

But as a much-quoted critique of Mr Schmitt went, ‘His preferred cure turned out to be infinitely worse than the disease.’

So too, the centre tells us, that the ministry of Sohail Afridi in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the disease, and emergency the cure.

As to what kind of disease, we can’t be sure. The centre claims militancy; terror bleeding back into the headlines. But if that is the main case to be made, everything that attaches to Sohail Afridi in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa also attaches to Sarfraz Bugti in Balochistan, a province nearly half the country’s landmass.

The unity regime is unhappy with such comparisons; apples and bowling balls, they say: Bugti’s ministers are cooperating with the centre, whereas Afridi’s are Taliban sympathisers. That, too, is an odd distinction: as Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman pointed out, Nawaz League had opposed Musharraf’s terror wars not too long ago, and no one had sent home the maulana’s coalition for putting up similar opposition in the same province after 2002.

Then there’s the timing: militancy has been resurgent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for years. Yet the din of emergency only sounded when Afridi announced he would hit the streets over access to his jailed leader, Imran Khan. Bloody terror attacks, and there were several, were never the trigger point.

If there was an explanation, it came — intentionally or otherwise — from prime minister Shehbaz Sharif the day emergency was declared. Sharif cited the PTI’s Long March protests at length: ‘Islamabad ki charhai…ka napak mansooba,’ was how he described it to his cabinet, before thanking Maulana Fazl for trying to keep the peace between the centre and the PTI (the maulana has since........

© Dawn Prism