There he was, comfortable in his Dubai digs, appearing on Bol TV as an analyst. The great generalissimo, Pervez Musharraf. The topic under discussion: Nehal Hashmi’s bizarre outburst against the members of the judiciary and the JIT investigating the Panama case.
How dare he, thundered the Commando; this man has no respect for the judiciary! He should be dealt with in the same manner as he is prescribing for dealing with the judiciary i.e through violence.
Granted, self-awareness is a quality few have. But the former military dictator really takes the cake, the baker and the bakery when it comes to being oblivious of his own history, specially when it comes to respecting the judiciary.
Now, lest this be interpreted as some sort of paean to former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, let me clarify that I mean no such thing. The man has a lot to atone for. Credit due to Imran Khan for scraping that sheen off him. No, this is only about the issue of respecting the judiciary. No justifying the boorish behaviour of Nehal Hashmi, but our man actually had the judges under house arrest.
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Though examples abound of the deplorable way the apex judiciary was treated by the military regime, no picture encapsulates quite as succinctly as this one by Sajjad Ali Qureshi, a photojournalist over at The Nation.
The “lawyers’ movement”, as it came to be known, had already been started, but this iconic photo of a police musclehead pushing the chief justice into a police vehicle really gave it the fillip that made it an internationally recognised movement.
The then editorial board of The Nation had realised the iconic nature of the image. Though Qureshi had zoomed in completely, the “meat” of the photo was still small, requiring digital zoom in post-production, which is, of course, accompanied by a loss of resolution. Not the quality that front pages carry. But they went with it. The rest is history. Qureshi was even called in by a tribunal hearing the manhandling case.