Pakistan has become a paagal khaana

By Justice Katju
I have been following developments in Pakistan on the social media for long, and now my mind has started spinning and my eyes boggling. Sometimes I feel like Alice in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ( see Lewis Carrol’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ ).

The latest event there really takes the cake. The President of Pakistan, Arif Alvi, has tweeted that he did not sign two bills ( the Official Secrets Act Amendment Bill, and the Army Act Amendment Bill ), and instead he had directed his staff to return them to the government for reconsideration, but only later he learnt that they had become laws ( due to which further atrocities are being committed against the people of Pakistan ).

Arif Alvi said his staff had told him that as directed by him they had returned the Bills to the Government, but it has now transpired that they did not. If the President is correct, someone forged his signatures on the Bills, and the government notified them as laws, and they have been acted upon.

It seems everyone in Pakistan has become mad as a hatter.
There is a Cheshire Cat, to whom Alice asks ” What sort of people live here ? ”. The cat replies ” In this direction lives a Hatter, and in that direction lives a March Hare. Visit either you like : they are both mad ”

So visitors to Pakistan can go in any direction they wish. It will not matter, because the authorities, particularly the army officers and police, have gone mad everywhere.

And there is a judiciary, which keeps sleeping like the Dormouse, and has become a joke.

Alice went to see the trial of the Knave of Hearts, who stole some tarts.

The Queen shouted ” Off with his head ”. The King suggested that a trial be held first before the sentence, but the Queen kept shouting ” Sentence first, trial afterwards ”, and the accused were beheaded without a trial.

This is what is happening on a large scale in Pakistan. Tens of thousands of people have been imprisoned without a trial, their homes broke

into and ransacked, and many brutally tortured.
There is a Constitution in Pakistan, and lawyers in court keep arguing about the meaning of its provisions e.g. Article 224(2) which says that elections must be held within 90 days of dissolution of a state assembly. But what do the words in the Constitution mean ?

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

Humpty Dumpty is being followed in Pakistan. The Pakistan army is the master. The Constitution means what the army says it means

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