It was shameful, from beginning to end, the way Karachi received, or didn’t receive, Pakistan’s beleaguered Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, fighting for the supremacy and dignity of law in an otherwise libertarian Pakistan.

Lahore, the proverbial ‘heart’ of Pakistan, had done itself, its valiant people and Pakistan proud, earlier in May, by according to the CJ a welcome worthy of the noble cause he has been espousing from that fateful day, on March 9, when a super-arrogant General Musharraf had summoned him to his ‘court’ and brought to bear on him the full weight of his khaki uniform. Lahore had the great zeal to roll out the red carpet for Justice Chaudhry’s caravan of justice and fair-play, despite the government juggernaut throwing up umpteen number of obstacles in its way.

After the resounding success of the democracy and justice caravan’s welcome in Lahore there was an understandable euphoria about this performance being repeated in Karachi, on an even larger scale. The expectations weren’t unfounded, after all. Hadn’t Karachi shone brightly as Pakistan’s premier, and often trail-blazing, beacon of light every time there had been such a popular agitation in the past?

Karachi had, rightly, earned its laurels as the seedbed of every democratic and popular movement against every authoritarian and autocratic regime in Pakistan. A movement, any movement for that matter, had to have its genesis in Karachi to pass the muster of popular assent.

It was here, in Karachi, that the fuse was lit against a besotted Ayub Khan, who thought he was going to rule over the country forever and, in that state of power inebriation, had embarked on celebrating his ‘decade of development.’ Well, the people of Karachi, fed up with his shenanigans and undemocratic pursuits, decided it was time to call his bluff, and did so in a few weeks, with eminent success.

Karachi didn’t even spare Zulfi Bhutto, whom it’d built up, overnight, into a national icon when he’d raised the standard of revolt against his old master, Ayub. But when Bhutto repeated the same mistake as Ayub, and outdistanced him, in fact, in the monopoly of power, the people of Karachi were right there, in the vanguard of the PNA agitation against his ham-fisted bungling at the national elections of the summer of 1977.

The people of my generation, calling Karachi ‘their city’, their abode, took obvious pride in Karachi’s ever-lit flame of freedom and liberty being a beacon unto all other partsand parcels of the land of Pakistan: a role-model proud of its great tradition of never siding with a tyrant but standing, unflinchingly, with those resisting the grubby hands of autocracy and dictatorship.

So, one wonders, what went wrong this time around? What has changed Karachi’s chemistry so radically as to array this great metropolis, this former crucible of freedom and liberty in Pakistan, on the side of an autocrat in the struggle against one-man’s tyranny?

The answer to this question could be one of the two possibilities, or a combination of the two: Karachi has strayed from its glorious past because the younger generation of Karachiites, has lost its marbles and compromised with tyranny against the tradition of its elders to stand up to it; or, the leadership of this city, and its people, has passed into those hands that are ready to sup with the devil and cast this great city’s traditional romance with the under-dog to the four winds. Or, as mentioned earlier, it could well be an unfortunate amalgam of the two.

The younger generation of Karachiites, no doubt, hasn’t ever been exposed to genuine democracy. Give it the benefit of doubt that even under the civilian regimes of Nawaz and Benazir, alternately, it was, at best, a quasi-democratic rule and, at worst, authoritarianism, crass opportunism, and blatant cronyism dressed as democracy.

Our generation had had a taste of democracy when we’re growing up, in schools and colleges, in the first 11 years of a Pakistan, which was democratic, with all those flaws of democracy normal even to the most advanced and matured democratic polities. So our hankering for return to that, let’s say for the sake of argument, flawed democratic polity was naturally compulsive. We hated Ayub’s authoritarian rule because we knew that the self-styled ‘Field Marshal’ had mischievously subverted democracy in Pakistan in order to pave the way for his autocracy.

Making a digression here, merely to highlight the difference between a democratic society and a non-democratic one, one must look at how India and Pakistan celebrated, or didn’t (as in our case) the historic day of May 11. It was on this day, exactly 150 years ago on May 11, 1857, that the mutinous Indian ‘sepoys’ of the expansionist and imperialistic East India Company had reached Delhi after the initial uprising, a day earlier, in the cantonment of the city of Meerut, not far from Delhi.

So the Republic of India, conscious of the great building-block status of the ‘Great Mutiny’ (to the British) and ‘War of Independence” to us, ‘wogs’ of undivided India, celebrated the historic day with all the dignity and penchant it deserved and demanded. There was a colourful and spectacular parade of artistes and performing floats outside the Red Fort of Delhi, pivotal symbol of that historic event. It was there, in 1857, that the freedom fighters resisting the British onslaught on the independence of India, had proclaimed the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, as their leader and commander.

But in Pakistan, there was no celebration of the historic day, as if it didn’t concern us. On the contrary, that was the day when dire warnings were being rocketed, from Islamabad, Karachi and as far away as London, at Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and his supporters not to dare enter Karachi because a rally was being planned, instead, in support of Musharraf’s one-man circus.

That, precisely, brings up the second point of the argument, i.e. the banner of leadership of Karachi and its people has passed into those hands that have seemingly little or no regard for the dictates of democracy, or the supremacy of the rule of law endemic to it.

This leadership had won the trust of the people of Karachi when it posed as the under-dog, a victim of the brutality exercised against it, and its young followers, by both the civilian leaders, masquerading as democrats, and the men in khaki whose disregard of the basic norms of democracy is at the root of much of Pakistan’s past and current problems.

How ironic, therefore, that the same ‘victimised’ and ‘brutalised’ leadership, having received the people of Karachi’s ungrudging mandate, is behaving exactly like its torturers of yesterdays. It doesn’t feel any remorse or pangs of conscience, in joining forces with those who had lashed it with impunity not too long ago, in order to put up a united front to impede the march of Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s caravan of democracy and justice into Karachi.

By behaving so errantly, and odiously, this leadership speaking and acting in the name of Karachi, proves those detractors and critics of it right who have consistently argued that it was cobbled together by Pakistan’s politicized army intelligence, in the first place, and doesn’t mind being in bed with the likes of ISI, or dance to the tune of its piper. The proof of pudding is in the eating, so the saying goes, and the proof of this leadership’s real agenda was delivered on May 12, loud and clear, when democracy’s caravan was stopped in bloodied tracks in the heart of Karachi.

Karachi and its benumbed denizens have a legitimate right to feel conned and cornered at the hands of those who’d sworn, when they needed votes, fealty to democracy but whose actions have failed to match their words in a moment of crunch. It’s a betrayal that must rankle the hearts and minds of the Karachiites, who have been made a laughing stock and are now being phoo-phooed by the rest of Pakistan, for having become the odd-man-out at this crossroads, when the forces of democracy have mustered strength to challenge Musharraf’s authoritarianism at its turf.

Karachi can’t afford to become a tool in the hands of those whose game plan suddenly looks suspiciously at odds with the rest of Pakistan. Karachi is much too important and sensitive to Pakistan’s present and future to be consumed by forces of anarchy. That’s not a tradition that my generation had ever conceived, or envisioned, for the ‘city of lights’ that our Karachi was in our youth, but has since turned into a depressing place of gloom and doom.

No wonder Musharraf, ‘Short-cut’ Aziz & Co. were so jubilant that same evening when they deployed the ample assets and resources of the state to put up a show of their strength in the vanguard of tyranny. They’d turned Karachi, the erstwhile bastion of freedom and liberty in Pakistan, into a replica of their brutal, undemocratic, reign over Pakistan—something that no military Bonaparte had managed to achieve before. Woe- betide the nation that has such callous leaders. Pakistan is aflame but the Neros of Islamabad are game to dancing and frolicking as if they’ve won a great battle.