As the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) drags its feet on reinstating the judges that Pervez Musharraf sacked, Aitzaz Ahsan is torn between the party that he’s wedded to and the cause that he cannot abandon.

Should Asif Ali Zardari choose to sacrifice the PPP’s partnership with Nawaz Sharif’s PML(N) — and possibly Pakistan’s coalition government itself— Ahsan will not rebel against his leader. However, there is no saying what the tsunami of resentment that the move will unleash end up consuming, he warns.

“There’ll be no closure on this,” says the man who led the lawyers’ agitation that drove Musharraf from power. “If they fail (to reinstate the judges), we’ll have countrywide sit-ins, and block road and rail traffic. You’ll see that. We’ll call for a Pakistan bandh.”

Sitting in an office awash with news pictures and articles from The New York Times, it is impossible to miss Ahsan’s commitment to the movement he heade — and to the man whose sacking by Musharraf inspired it. Ahsan takes great pride in showing a picture of him driving Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry through a sea of people delirious with happiness at the judge’s reinstatement in 2007.

It was the issue of reinstating the 60 other judges that Musharraf sacked that had in fact, resulted in the formation of the PPP-PML(N) coalition. It is also the issue on which it is currently being tested. “We had hoped the judges would be restored after the government was formed, but that didn’t happen,” says Ahsan.

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