State’s cases in courts

EDITORIAL: The ruling coalition has only itself to blame for snail-paced progress in the matter of letting go of incumbent law officers associated with PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf) and hiring about 120 new ones to pursue the state’s cases in superior courts.

And the main reason for the delay is lack of consensus among the parties that make up the PDM (Pakistan Democratic Movement). It turns out that when the new government was formed in April, the law ministry promptly forwarded a list to the PM Office, regarding both removal of existing officers and new appointments, but the summary was later returned with directions to Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar to accommodate nominees of PPP (Pakistan People’s Party).

Now the jury is out on whether these will be merit-based appointments or the usual political handouts. Considering the not-so-distant past, when these parties would take turns filling state enterprises with their political workers, it’s natural for this, too, to smack of more of the same. Yet such are the compulsions of coalition government. The spoils must be spread around. But it’s still difficult to understand the delay, which has now slowed down the working of the attorney general’s office. It doesn’t help, of course, that the AG himself has been away from the country for a while, for treatment, and has just come back; only to be greeted by this paralysis.

Such things suffice to show just how seriously the political elite takes the very serious matter of very slow functioning of the legal system. The judiciary has never been able to address its huge, embarrassing backlog; something that even two seasons of suo motu frenzy overlooked completely. And here we have our rulers, who are not just not part of the solution, which ought to be unacceptable enough, but are actually part of the problem.

There’s enough in these things to prompt some soul searching in both the government and the judiciary. The former is ultimately responsible for ensuring that justice is delivered all across the land; part of which is making sure it is not delayed either. And the latter must no longer delay its own moment of reckoning, when it must shake itself and work out if it can really turn around from being one of the worst ranked, in terms of performance, in the whole world.

Even now, if the press is to be trusted, the latest buzz in the legal community is not about how this issue of legal officers will affect the state’s cases or the working of the courts, but whether or not it will cast a shadow on the Supreme Court Bar Association’s (SCBA’s) annual elections due in October.

Word is that the law ministry has finally solved this puzzle and soon enough all the law officers will be in place to carry forward the business of the state. It can only be hoped that no political party will have any more problems and this trend will not be repeated across other sectors. Throwing around government jobs and rewarding loyalists has been an undeniable feature of Pakistani politics for far too long. And it’s equally true that this tradition is at the heart of the cancer that has all but killed a number of our institutions and industries.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem as if things are going to end anytime soon. Because all parties, across the board, embrace it equally shamelessly; including all those that promise revolutionary change and rainbows. Nor can we hope for a sudden, comprehensive change in the system of our politics, which feeds into this culture of patronage. But we can still expect them to put properly qualified people in important positions, and not drag on the processes of hiring and firing forever.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022