The agreement that sent the Sharifs packing was itself politics using law, putty-like, to hide its coarse surface. The SC has scratched it. Law has won but only when the political situation began to unfold in its favour.

The government has determined that if the ‘agreement’ had no legal value, then it is status quo ante in relation to the Sharifs. No agreement means the cases against the brothers remain intact, as do their convictions. Here we see again the use of law to serve political ends. It remains to be seen how the court(s) would react to the Sharifs’ appeals against the pending cases and convictions — though, and this is interesting again, the majority of Pakistanis think they (the Sharifs) will be exonerated.

Clearly, in the political tussle between the Musharraf government and the rest, people have come to expect the SC and the law to be on their side. Nothing less will do or, if popular sentiment is expressed plainly, be tolerated.

Whether the honourable court will allow itself to be dictated by the people or by the impersonal letter of the law is one of the imponderables right now. The trend is worrying but shows that when politics seeks to put the law down, the legal-normative framework is demolished and structural anomalies created. In Pakistan’s version of The People Vs Larry Flynt, Musharraf is likely to lose.

On the other side of politics, the news should worry Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party. Bhutto had assessed that more than the civil-military divide, the extremist-liberal contradiction was going to determine the future of Pakistan. That meant ‘dealing’ with Musharraf and finding some mechanism for a smooth transition to the next phase.

... contd.