Khan govt, Army at loggerheads with judiciary in Pakistan

The fissures in the Pakistani establishment are deepening with the Imran Khan government lashing out in public at the judiciary on behalf of the military.

The federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry on Friday took on the judiciary over the death sentence awarded to former Army chief and President Pervez Musharraf by a special court in a high treason case for imposing emergency and overriding the judicial system in Pakistan.

In a series of tweets, Chaudhry said the Army was being "targeted under a specific strategy" to "divide and weaken it".

"This is not an individual matter of Pervez Musharraf's; the Pakistan Army was targetted with a specific strategy. First the army and ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) were involved in the (Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan) sit-in case, then the Army chief's extension was made controversial and now a popular former army chief has been humiliated," he said, while trying to draw correlation between the different political episodes that hit the South Asian nation in the last few years.

"The sequence of events is not a judicial or legal matter anymore, it is more than that. If the institution of the army is divided or weakened, then it will not be possible to save (the country) from anarchy," he said.

In a strong defence of the Army, Chaudhry said: "Pakistan Army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa and the current Army setup has stood by democratic institutions but this support should not be considered as a weakness."

In Pakistan, its widely known that Khan and his ruling party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf were propped by the military. Prime Minister Khan is routinely called the Army's civilian face in the country.

The government has strongly come in support of the Army and the former military dictator Musharraf and has decided to defend him in an appeal against the special court's verdict in the case of high treason.

The 76-year-old Musharraf is incidentally, in self-imposed exile in Dubai and getting treated for his critical ailments.