Finally the judges who colluded in the Nov 3 attack on the judiciary and the jiala judges inducted after Nov 3 are out. This was the unfinished business of restoring the judiciary to its Nov 2 status, and today, we can fully celebrate the victory of the lawyers’ movement.

In addition to a stinging indictment of Musharraf, it is also a big blow for the PPP, which was on board with Musharraf in Nov 3 and used it as an opportunity to get him to appoint its own favourites in the judiciary. This was the reason the PPP never protested Nov 3 seriously, BB herself was playing a double game on the judiciary issue, then after her assasination, Zardari and the others picked up from where she had left and tried their best to maintain the Dogar court. In one of the most blatent displays of complicity, Latif Khosa personally attended the PCO oath ceremony of Ahsan Bhoon, one of the PPP judges inducted into the LHC, and also openly defended Mr. Bhoon on Geo TV during the live coverage of the first long march.

The struggle for the judiciary’s restoration also revealed some people whose commitment to democracy and principles ends where the PPP starts. There were those who were actively involved in the movement when Musharraf was in power, made passionate speeches about the independence of the judiciary, and demanded the unconditional restoration of Iftikhar Chaudhry. But as soon as the PPP came into power and its opposition to the restoration of the judiciary became clear, they started coming up with all kinds of twisted arguments against the continuation of the lawyers’ movement. They suddenly started finding faults with CJ Iftikhar Chaudhry, claimed that he had become politicized, argued that the lawyers’ movement had become right wing, insisted that this was now a PML-N project for overthrowing the PPP and coming into power, and last but not the least, used the PPP’s favourite scare mongering tactic by saying that taking to the streets would result in a military take over. Fortunately, the civil society did not listen to them, the movement continued without these PPP B-teams, and today, the the judiciary has finally been restored to the Nov 2 status.

With the judiciary restored, one hopes that the PPP and its B-teams have learned a lesson from all this, and will hopefully show better adherence to principles in the future. One also hopes that the judiciary will zealously guard its hard-faught independence, and strike down any attempt to mix the executive with the judiciary, whether it is in the form of a political party trying to appoint its own favourites as judges, or whether it is the attempt to revive the colonial institution of the executive magistracy.

Aqil Sajjad

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