- Collision course!
Hopefully the snub from the chief justice will be enough for Punjab’s illustrious bureaucrats to avoid taking the law into their own hands and return to their jobs. By observing a strike and threatening to shut down the secretariat the civil service only feeds accusations that some officers, who have allegedly been in cahoots with Ahad Cheema (now in NAB custody), are trying to whip up a storm to get him out before he starts talking. Some of NAB’s actions following the arrest, though, indicate that Cheema might already be singing like a canary, so reasons behind the anxiety in some senior cadres of the service – not to mention the CM office — might well become apparent soon enough.
And it’s not just LDA that the long arms of the law are bent upon putting right. The chief justice’s crusade – for the benefit of the people, of course – entails providing food, security, shelter, real milk, healthy meat and clean drinking water. Anybody falling out of line will not just prompt suo motto notices but also feature in His Lordship’s near-daily interaction with the press. Once again in our judicial history the honourable court’s pronouncements are not restricted to its judgments.
Yet as the honourable chief justice walks across town to find problems he can use his good offices to solve, surely he’d also see much wear, tear and corruption much closer to home, within the sacred walls of the courts. Since his court notices and press conferences can shake the high and mighty into ready compliance, it should not be beyond his power to address some of the problems plaguing the judiciary since forever – backlog going into decades, corruption, bribery, unruly lawyers, just to name a few. Indeed, when justice delivery improves, much of what else is wrong with the country becomes easier to fix. Perhaps the best thing for the CJ to do at this time is the get the judiciary itself to pull its socks up.
