“Why did you have to defend a man like Mir Shakil ur Rehman?” asked a reader.
I was baffled at this question. I was defending a cardinal principle of justice, that a person is assumed to be innocent before guilt is proved by the prosecution under due process of law. And that principle applies to everyone.
This cardinal principle is based on yet another cardinal principle: that it is better to let a hundred allegedly guilty people go free than to hang one innocent person because a life once taken cannot be returned if later it is found that the person was wrongly hanged. By the same token, if even one month of a life is taken, how can anyone return it? These are principles that are universal in time and space. Sadly, this habit of assuming guilt first to coerce evidence out of an accused has been a long time in the making and it is not the doing of the recent judiciary. The judiciary itself is just a victim of precedent and asinine laws. So instead of trying to still the voice of people who speak the truth as they see it, the government should revisit the accountability law and reconstitute the National Accountability Bureau before it is too late. If this goes on, one day, the government and its functionaries may change roles and the persecutors of today will become the prosecuted of tomorrow.
I have personal experience of the high-handedness of the State. When Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto arrested my father, Altaf Gauhar for the third time because he didn’t like his editorials in Dawn, a large posse of policemen broke down our gate and then the front door and demanded that Altaf Gauhar present himself into their custody. They were accompanied by a magistrate and, incidentally, the home secretary of Sindh was supervising the entire operation seated in his car.
“Where is the arrest warrant?” we asked. The magistrate’s reply put the sorry condition of the judiciary into a nutshell: “I am as good as a warrant.” Beat that if you can! That same magistrate was later promoted and became God knows what.
We noticed two police trucks standing outside and were later told that they were carrying weapons that they intended to plant in our house to implicate my father in the conspiracy where they claimed to have recovered a huge cache of arms in the Iraqi embassy. But, because of the family’s presence and the arrival of the intrepid Colonel Yaqub (may God bless him), who had turned up and was standing outside the gate, they could not. They thrashed up our chowkidar, Masti Khan, and were going to take him away too until we raised a further racket. Then they wanted to take away my portable typewriter, some foolscap paper and a briefcase. It was clear that they wanted to write some nonsense on the paper with our typewriter and place it in our briefcase and concoct charges against Altaf Gauhar. Again, our resistance stopped them from doing so. In frustration, the magistrate said to the SHO of the lock-up concerned, whose name was Kiyani, “Go and do your duty!” So he ran upstairs and kicked down Altaf Gauhar’s bedroom door. I will not go into the gory details of how my cousin Babar and I were manhandled and, along with my mother and young sisters and my uncle Tajammul, we were put under house arrest till morning. I managed to escape from house arrest with, of course, the connivance of the police guard who were actually sympathetic to us.
Another interesting aspect of this episode was that when some days later, I barged into the office of the then attorney general, Yahya Bakhtyar, he along with the advocate general of Sindh, a man called Memon, (I think his first two names were Abdul Hafeez) and their clerks had been ordered by the court to produce within half an hour, the Indian and Afghan passports that my father was supposed to be “escaping” on along with, if you please, a bottle of whisky and $400. They also claimed to have found some pornographic literature and photographs in Altaf Gauhar’s house, which needless to say, did my reputation no good because I was his young son. Anyway, Yahya Bakhtayar and Abdul Hafeez Memon were busy forging the Indian and Afghan passports. Can you beat it: the attorney general of Pakistan and the advocate general of Sindh forging passports? The reason I had happened to enter the room is because our great lawyer, the incomparable Mr. Manzur Qadir, had given me some papers to deliver to the attorney general. He took them sheepishly. But such people are not burdened by embarrassment or shame. The passports were presented in court and it was a joke. The Indian passport had been seized from a real Indian whose name had been rubbed out and my father’s name written over it in an uneducated hand in the wrong spelling: “Iltaf Goher.” My father’s photograph on the Afghan passport had been cut out from the day’s newspaper and glued on. The court found that the photograph was still wet. Of course Yahya Bakhtayar remained attorney-general and Abdul Hafeez Memon was elevated as a judge to the Sind Balochistan High Court (as it was then called).
Only after Mr. Bhutto’s government fell, a military court asked me to give evidence in the trial of the home secretary, Muhammad Khan Junejo (not the former prime minister). Other witnesses along with me were the late Muhammad Salahuddin (editor of Jasarat) and Mr. J.A. Rahim, who was once regarded as Mr. Bhutto’s mentor. If I also told you about the harrowing experiences that they recounted and what Mr. Bhutto’s goons did with J.A. Rahim and his son, Sikander, I think my editor would find it difficult to publish this article. And what they did with Salahuddin, putting him in a cage. An interesting incident during this trial was that when they reproduced the bottle of whisky that they had alleged Altaf Gauhar had had in his possession (which by the way was a Queen Anne bottle), I noticed some black specks floating around in the bottle and I asked the judge to open it. Abracadabra, it turned out to be tea, not whisky! In case you are wondering, Altaf Gauhar was kept in a hole in the ground for one week. None of us knew where he was and one day, when I drove to the civil courts in Karachi, a police van happened to bring out a triple murderer for his hearing. He looked at me and came running towards me in chains and fetters with a hysterical police chasing after him! He shouted out my name as if he knew me well, shook my hand and managed to put a scrap of paper in it before he was hauled away. I quietly pocketed it, strolled to my car and drove off, and after about a mile or so stopped and read the scrap of paper, which was the kind you find in a cigarette packet. It was in my father’s handwriting in which all he said was that he was in a hole in the ground and to get him out. At that point, I went to get the amazing Malik Ghulam Jilani and we both went to Justice Tufailali Abdur Rahman, the Chief Justice of the Sindh Balochistan High Court. Tufailali, by the way, was the kind of judge every country should have: highly educated with a razor sharp intellect and a great command over the English language. He withstood all the pressures that Mr. Bhutto put on him. Tufailali was given the note by his secretary and he ordered the immediate production of Altaf Gauhar. When Altaf Gauhar came, the blue suit that he had been wearing had turned brown and was stinking of excrement. He had been in the dark so he could not see in the light and he was unable to speak. So we took permission of the court to let him have a shower in the high court building and in the meantime we fetched him a fresh set of clothes and later gave him hot tea. Both Mr. Manzur Qadir and Mr. A.K Brohi sat with him and finally he was able to start talking. Now you know why I ask ‘What justice?’ Those days are too painful to recall.
To be fair to the judges, we won all our cases, which had been instituted by my mother, Zarina Gauhar. The first being, the case against the validity of martial law of which Mr. Bhutto was now chief martial law administrator, the first civilian ever to hold that position. It came to be known as the famous Asma Jilani case but its full name is the Asma Jilani Zarina Gauhar case. This was when my father was arrested the first time. The Supreme Court declared Yahya Khan a usurper (mind you, the same Supreme Court had validated his coup earlier) and ordered martial law to be lifted immediately and an interim constitution brought in because you have to have a basic law. Mr. Bhutto had to do this the next day. My father was given release orders in prison and simultaneously given arrest orders under the State of Emergency Regulations.
When the tamasha was over and Mr. Bhutto and my father finally met, Bhutto said, “Altaf, you can institute all the cases that you want. Law courts do not exist in my book.” Sadly, after he fell, the law courts figured all too prominently in his life and sentenced him to be executed. Because of this, I hold no grievance against him as the son of the man he hounded and harassed so much. My eyes have welled up therefore it is best to stop.
