Hunter and prey.

Byline: Irfan Husain

SO this is how our democracy collapses: not with a bang, but a whimper.

One by one, the pillars of our constitutional framework have been yanked from their foundations by political engineers and their civilian assistants. While the facade has been left more or less intact, the reality is that we can no longer claim that Pakistan is a functioning democracy.

True, elections are held regularly, but judging from the blatant manipulation evident in 2016, these hardly reflect the popular will. Another institution that should be protecting the Constitution is the opposition. But given the pressure from the establishment they are operating under, as well as the squabbling between the PPP and the PML-N, they have failed in their primary task of holding the government to account.

The higher judiciary may have been effective in blocking the privatisation of public-sector enterprises that have lost hundreds of billions, but has been unable to act as a bulwark against Bonapartism. The recent case against Supreme Court Justice Qazi Faez Isa is a case in point.

Here we have an upright judge who is due to become chief justice in a couple of years, but is now a target for the establishment and this government for the forthright judgement he wrote about the completely illegal sit-in at Faizabad, and the appearance of military encouragement to the violent clerics who had organised it. Another sin was his tough report on the killing of scores of lawyers in bomb blasts in Quetta.

We can't claim we are a functioning democracy.

Some asked: could the establishment afford to have such an independent chief justice?

Then, an unknown so-called journalist filed a complaint raising questions about some properties bought in London by Justice Isa's wife, a working woman, an heiress to property, and a registered taxpayer. Never mind that her husband had nothing to do with her property purchases, and paid his taxes independently of her.

This manufactured case was sent to the president (once believed to be an admirer of Justice Isa when he was chief justice of the Balochistan High Court) who referred it to the Supreme Judicial Council. Instead of rejecting such a flimsy reference against a brother judge, the 10-member bench has delivered a judgment that has tried to distance the Supreme Court from the final outcome, and passed the buck to the tax authorities. This does not bode well for Justice Isa or for judicial independence, no matter what the...