The phone rang. The judges are being packed off, a source calling from Islamabad said. Rumours of emergency were in the air, there was growing tension between the Presidency and the Supreme Court and we knew that the country had come very close to a clampdown a week or so ago.

It now seemed like then-General-President Pervez Musharraf was going to cross the clichéd Rubicon. Just as I was shaking my head, the gizmo came alive again. The deed had been done. The Taliban suddenly disappeared from the radar screen. The bigger fish had eaten the now smaller one. The media is a sucker for the big one anyway.

Next stop Islamabad, en route to Lahore. The Taliban can wait. I heard Musharraf’s speech with the local district administration officers that night in a deserted Serena Hotel. Before dawn break, I was on my way back.

Looking back, the obvious question: has anything changed? Yes, in form; none in substance. The French too have their clichés: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Musharraf is gone; the king’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), is in disarray; elections have brought to power Pakistan’s largest political party, the Pakistan People’s Party, followed closely by Musharraf’s bête noire, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz; Asif Ali Zardari is now the president.

Enough change? Yes. Improved governance and policy-making? No.

Let’s take one benchmark, the issue that sat in the middle of Pakistani politics for almost a year-and-half: judges’ restoration.

The lawyers wouldn’t give up. They also got the support of civil society actors. Even the political parties lent support to their cause. This was when Musharraf was still around. After the elections, the two largest parties, the PPP and the PMLN, went into a coalition and signed the now infamous Murree Declaration.

The PPP kept dithering on the restoration issue, frustrating the PMLN which had made it the central slogan of its electioneering. Zardari then delivered the coup de grace. The PMLN also wanted to get rid of Musharraf. How about getting the PMLN support to oust Musharraf and then let the judges fall by the wayside?

The PMLN fell for it, not realising that the sting lay in the sequence. It was passionate about booting out Musharraf and it couldn’t say no to PPP efforts to get rid of the hated general. With Musharraf out of the way, Zardari could play and play he did, getting most parties to support his bid for presidency and isolating the PMLN.

But becoming president also meant the enhanced powers of the president would remain within the Constitution. And they have. The king is dead, long live the king.

Meanwhile, back channel efforts were already on to convince the judges to return and be “reappointed” through a new oath which, for all practical purposes, endorses Musharraf’s November 3 actions. The PPP government knew that if they could get a few judges back, human nature and the compulsions of a system being what they are, most would return. And they have. Those who remain steadfast are martyrs in the cause. They can beget poems and paeans but not much else. And it is much else that Pakistan needs.

On October 28, the lawyers delivered a blow to the PPP government. Ali Ahmad Kurd, one of the leading lawyers calling for the reinstatement of sacked chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, won the election for the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) despite much effort by the government to make him lose.

But his victory comes at a time when it may not mean much beyond the normative and the symbolic. In practical terms, it means the agenda remains unfinished. And while Kurd’s win has been sizeable, it is more tactical than strategic and falls way short of what was required and demanded.

The embarrassment of its candidate’s defeat the government can live with, gloating instead over its victory in putting down the movement. But that victory bodes ill for Pakistan’s quest towards finding a political balance underwritten by a legal-constitutional norm. The lawyers, then, have retrieved a post after losing the war.

The question is: how can a party wedded to democratic-constitutional governance finish the agenda of a supposed military dictator, even show itself to be better at it? The issue goes beyond the person of Zardari or his perfidy to a larger domain. Given that Pakistan’s largest political party has allowed itself to be led by Zardari and also actively supported him in his bid to become president of this country, any inquiry must begin to look at the nature and composition of parties in Pakistan.

Such an inquiry, if it can determine that political parties are not evolved entities in any modern sense but work on the basis of organised patron-client relations at multiple levels, would then force us to rethink our enthusiasm for “democracy” which works in and through current political groupings.

The form of democracy is important. But procedures must begin to translate into substance. As things stand, “electoralism” expressed through existing political structures may not promise change. This is why it is important to not only look at the nature of political parties but also linkages among various players. Such an inquiry, of necessity, must go beyond the rather simplistic shibboleth of civil-military imbalance to a deeper problem — one where the political actors may be as much responsible for the current status quo as the military.

November 3 is a good day to look into some of these puzzles, especially if Pakistan wants to get out of its crests and troughs.

Incidentally, the Taliban story is once again the Patiala peg of the media. I shall drink to that!

The writer is op-ed editor, The Daily Times, and consulting editor, The Friday Times, Lahore; views expressed here are his own express@expressindia.com