The traditional court — and we must slot the next few successors in this mould until they prove otherwise — is protective of the institution.By arrangement with Dawn. It was terrible — but important in one undeniable way: he made the court a player again. But his successors, in trying to bring balance back after years of judicial hyperactivism, have overcompensated.Chaudhry was bad for the system.Good luck to him. It’s possible the epochs may cancel themselves out: the last Soft TPE Plastic Injection Molding decade of militancy countering the lessons of Zia.Where the incumbent has seemed uncertain and, at times, flummoxed, Chaudhry would likely have seized history and assumed centrestage with relish. Chief Justice Nisar will be, nearly, the last chief justice from the Iftikhar Chaudhry era. First chief born in the ’60s — 1960 — and therefore first chief born after the first coup. In the institutional scheme of things, in the system of checks and balances, the court was emphatically relevant again.On to Bajwa.Now, the incumbent couldn’t resist a shot at immortality — or infamy — and ended up disappointing everyone.A slashing, smashing, alarming judgement would have been handed down in double-quick time and, depending on his whims and the partialities involved, the PML(N) would either hastily be searching for a new PM or crowing about court-authored vindication. Gone is the Chaudhry substance — which is a good thing — and gone too is the Chaudhry flavour, which isn’t such a good thing.
Eras and institutional decades can seem contrived and imposed ex post, a too-convenient way of explaining the past and divining the future.Jurists and experts can argue over what else could have been done. For our purposes, what’s important is the reassertion of the old order, a perceptual gap between how Chaudhry saw the court and how most of his predecessors did and, now, successors do.Chaudhry was of the katchery mould, a freewheeler alert to both what works with the people and what he could get away with. He actually is a triple first.(Two more judges, Asif Khosa and Gulzar Ahmed, will be future chief justices who were installed in the Supreme Court when Iftikhar Chaudhry was still chief justice. This much is clear: If Chaudhry had been around, this Panama Papers and London flats business would not have tied his court in knots.But they’ve replaced it with a nothingness: a court above the hoi polloi and therefore with no populist support; and a court unable to be relevant, even in a disruptive way, to the institutional order and a checks-and-balances scheme.Bajwa is the first chief of the Zia era — the first army chief to have joined the military, in 1980, after the Zia coup.)Change, surely, is upon Pakistan. The trappings and solemnities of office surely mattered, but only to the extent that they projected power and demanded obedience. Because in a chief or two, we’ll be slipping into the longest era of all: the Children of Zia
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