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“A referendum against Musharraf, military”

— Photo: S. Subramanium

The chairperson of the Human Rights Commission, Pakistan, Asma Jahangir, delivers the second Walter Sisulu Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on Thursday. The Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia University, Mushirul Hasan, is at right.

NEW DELHI: The general elections in Pakistan were not just a referendum against President Pervez Musharraf but also against the military, noted lawyer and human rights activist Asma Jahangir said.

Delivering the second “Walter Sisulu Memorial Lecture” at Jamia Millia Islamia here on Thursday, she said: “There is a deep deficit of trust in the military. The kind of abuse that the military has got this time, it has never happened before… We have seen nothing other than blood in the last two years. Now we don’t want any more violence, not even for him [Musharraf]. We want a peaceful exit for him.”

Speaking on the topic “Honouring the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan,” Ms. Jahangir said lawyers played a magnificent role in organising protests against President Musharraf but “faltered” when some lawyers gave a call for a boycott of the elections. “We did make a mistake there.”

She recalled that there was resistance within the Pakistan Bar Association when General Musharraf sacked five judges in 2002, but it transformed into a movement with lawyers taking to the streets when he sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary in March last year.

“When General Musharraf took over, the Bar Association was among the first of some of the institutions that said they would not accept the Musharraf regime…When the Chief Justice was humiliated, there was a spontaneous response from lawyers all over the country who decided to hold a protest. It was a call of conscience of every member of the Association,” she said.

“During the Emergency in November, lawyers were beaten up but they still kept up their protest.”

Referring to the assassination of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto — that was a “low point” in the country when people feared for their lives — Ms. Jahangir alleged that after her death, there was “not a single strain or worry on the face of our rulers.”

Stating that she had great regard for Ms. Bhutto, Ms. Jahangir said: “It is not that we agreed with her politics or her style. But we all agree that she had the right to live. Her life was taken, a life that could have taken the democratic process forward.”

In the elections held this Monday, she said people of a “depressed nation” had got up to exercise their vote. “Imagine the atmosphere of terror in which these elections took place. But the electorate of Pakistan has demonstrated that it yearns for democracy and that it is far more mature than [that of] the United States,” she added.

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