ON Monday, a new chief justice presided over the Supreme Court, as people watched with hope and trepidation. The mood was not as celebratory and optimistic as it was a year ago when Qazi Faez Isa had taken over the Supreme Court as chief justice. However, back then, in the age of innocence, many were naïve enough to assume that Isa would prove to be a stronger judge who would carry the court with him unlike his predecessor who was seen as weak. The latter’s weakness was said to have divided the apex court. And in that hope, Isa’s beginning was everything that Umar Ata Bandial’s ending was not.

But a year later, it seems those hopes were misplaced, for Isa has left behind a far weaker and more divided court than he inherited. And while he cannot be blamed for being weak, he wasn’t immune to a tragic flaw. But more than the flaws of chief justices, it is the larger context which has ended up shaping the Supreme Court in the recent past, as it will in the coming days.

Isa, like many of the judges who came before him, was a product of the times, as was for example, his benefactor, Iftikhar Chaudhry, or Saqib Nisar who went from being known as a textbook jurist to an idiosyncratic ‘baba’ who took to surprise visits to lower courts and hospitals and becoming a dam builder.

Iftikhar Chaudhry confronted the very dictator under whom he became chief justice, took on the mantle of an anti-establishment figure, and brought down........

© Dawn