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THE Islamabad High Court’s detailed judgement on military encroachments on Margalla Hills National Park is a warning for the various parties involved to reassess their involvement in ‘extracurricular’ activities that often cause harm to their professional responsibilities.
By any consideration, the armed forces should never have gotten involved in activities that are a distraction from their core responsibility: protecting the nation’s frontiers and its people from malevolent forces. It is worth asking what led them to become so invested in commercial activities like the operation of golf courses or restaurants in the process of defending the country.
The judgement, that follows the court’s short order in January, has opened the door for this conversation: “The Pakistan Army has no power nor jurisdiction to, directly or indirectly, engage in business ventures of any nature outside its composition nor to claim the ownership of state land,” it reads.
At last, we can talk about the elephant that has for long been squeezing everyone else in the room.
The judgement certainly does not pull any punches. “The urge of state institutions to act as a state within the state is obvious,” it notes in one place.
It is important that the court’s rebuke be taken in its intended spirit: when the most powerful institutions of the country start acting in defiance or contravention of the law — the same law they are sworn to uphold and which underpins the state they pledge to give blood and sweat to protect — it sends the signal that the state is weak and can be overruled if one has enough power. This paves the path to disorder and anarchy, which is the antithesis of the responsibility assigned to all organs of the state tasked with protecting it. The judgement makes particular note of this, and it is unfortunate that matters have come to the point where the armed forces need to be reprimanded for their transgressions by the courts.
It would be doubly unfortunate, however, if the matter is not taken seriously and is once again swept under the carpet once the public’s attention is sufficiently diverted.
The unfortunate reality is that state institutions’ blatant disregard for laws has emboldened many non-state elements to make very similar attempts to grab state resources by using some very wrong precedents set by the former. It is time we drew the line somewhere. The blatant grab for resources and assets that belong first to the people has to stop.
