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.

... contd.