As legend has it, once upon a time in the Year of Grace 1057 there lived an Earl of Chester, Lord of the City of Coventry. He decided to raise a new tax to finance his army (we, of course, in 2002 being no strangers to such action).

Chester's young wife, moved by the poverty of the people, implored him to spare them this heavy burden (we are experts on such burdens). Knowing his wife to be extremely prudish, the Earl set her a challenge to which he was convinced she would never respond. He vowed that he would lift the tax if she would ride naked through the streets of the city.

The good Lady Godiva accepted the challenge. Covered completely by her long, full tresses, she rode her steed through the deserted streets of Coventry - deserted because the people in recognition of Lady Godiva's sacrifice remained cloistered in their houses with their doors and windows firmly shut. The shamed husband kept his promise and waived the tax. The Earl and his Lady lived to a ripe old age in the midst of their grateful people.

A thousand years ago, man had respect for woman. The Earl threw down his challenge supremely confident that his wife would not rise to it. Now, in our country, good citizens of Pakistan, presumably good Muslims, find pride and amusement in forcefully parading their women naked through jam-packed streets. Meerwalla, near Muzaffargarh (a town which brings to mind Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's 'Loin of the Punjab', Mustafa Khar, and his dozen wives and Hookah-Master Nasrullah Khan, Benazir Bhutto's expert on Kashmir affairs) is a sleepy little village in the wilderness with no schools, only mosques. The landholdings of the absentee landlords are large and poverty and misery rife.

Justice is rudimentary and selective. Last month, a boy whose exact age is known neither to him nor to his accusers - he could be eleven, he could be fourteen - was allegedly caught in a compromising position with an elder woman of a superior social standing. The question of who had led on whom did not arise. The boy was the culprit. He was beaten up, gleefully sodomized by a string of gentlemen of a higher social standing.

Thereafter a so-called panchayat of some eighty stout citizens, most of them armed, met to decide on further punishment. The boy's father was asked to produce one of his daughters. He brought forth a daughter, a divorcee in her thirties. As is the honourable custom in this country, honour plays a large and important part when it comes to meting out punishment. In this case, one woman's honour was redeemed on June 22, 2002, by the gang-rape of another woman. Honour-killing, honour-rape, it all boils down to the same thing. It happens every day, all over the country, in its remote villages and towns inhabited by illiterate, brutalized barbarians.

In Meerwala, the police took no action when the matter was reported to them on June 30, supposedly because they knew no better than to believe that justice had been done, ignorant of other forms of justice which prevail in the outer world, and out of fear of the local bigwigs.

But one advocate of conscience, Zilfikar Ahmad Bhutta, on July 2 filed an application in the Supreme Court of Pakistan asking the chief justice to take note of the incident and initiate suo motu action. This the chief justice did and the case was heard on July 4. The relevant police officials of the province and the district were summoned. Up to then, no arrests had been made, but reported yesterday was the fact that one of the gang-rapists had miraculously been 'found' by the police and arrested.

The chief justice has requested that the police 'not sleep over the matter' and the case has been adjourned till July 11 when he has ordered that a report be presented to him on the progress of the investigation.

However, I think that the good Advocate Bhutta should at this stage be reminded of how the Supreme Court of Pakistan went about defending its own honour. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

The whole world and our honourable judges, past and present, know that the Supreme Court of Pakistan, situated on Constitution Avenue in Islamabad, was stormed on November 28, 1997, by our democratic prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his equally democratic ministers and cohorts.

Not a living soul in this country, other than the ardent Muslim Leaguers, had any doubt that Sharif and the others responsible would be charged and convicted for having committed the gravest of contempt of court, in the very face of the court. He was not charged; a handful of his minions were (one of was PTV performer Tariq Aziz, who was handpicked this year for his skills and appointed to 'introduce' our President General Pervez Musharraf when on the hustings at Lahore electioneering for his disastrous referendum).

After Sharif tripped over his own toes, the first chief justice of Pakistan of this military regime, Justice Irshad Hasan Khan, revived the matter (Criminal Appeal 162/99) and somehow managed to convict seven of Sharif's 'footstormtroopers'. Having been involved in the Supreme Court's 1998 investigations into the storming and its hearing of evidence, on October 6, 2000, I wrote to Chief Justice Khan, inter alia, reminding him:"By your judgment delivered on September 28, 2000, 1034 days after the storming of the Supreme Court, seven 'footstormtroopers' have been convicted and the buck was passed on to 'a superintendent of police'.

"Also sent is a reproduction of excerpts from my column 'Storming of the Supreme Court - 2' printed in Dawn on April 5, 1998." (This concerned the first case in Britain in which the Court of Appeal had to consider contempt in the face of the court (1970 2 QB 114), after a group of Welsh students, upset because programmes in Wales were being broadcast in English and not in Welsh, staged a dramatic invasion of the court in protest. The court was invaded on February 4, 1970, the students were sentenced the same day, their appeal was heard on February 9 and decided on February 11 - all within the space of one week.)

To go back to the beginning. Pursuant to the order of the then chief justice, Criminal Miscellaneous 27/98 was registered and proceedings in the case were commenced on March 2, 1998. During the course of the investigation proceedings it was not deemed necessary by the court to inquire into the background and run-up to the storming of the court, nor into the reasons why it was engineered.

On July 3, 1998, show-cause notices were directed to be issued to 26 respondents, and such notices were issued on October 11, 1998.

On March 1, 1999, further proceedings against eight activists of the Muslim League were postponed until the decision in the criminal case against them (FIR 229/97, PS Secretariat, Islamabad), and apologies tendered by ten officers of the police and administration were accepted. Contempt charges were framed against two MNAs, four MPAs, and one PML (N) activist.

The judgment of May 14, 1999, signed by three judges acquitted the seven respondents, as charges of contempt were not established against any of them on the basis of the evidence produced before them. The judgment impliedly held that no one was responsible for the storming of the Supreme Court on November 28, 1997. Cr. Appeal 162/99 against the judgment of May 14, 1999, was heard on November 19, 1999, by a Supreme Court Bench of 12, and for the first time notice was issued to the PML (N) at House No.4, Khayaban-e-Iqbal, F-7/3, Islamabad.

The court was stormed on November 28, 1997. The verdict in the contempt case, acquitting the few insignificant members of the storming party who had been charged, was given on May 14, 1999, over five hundred days later. Seven hundred and twenty-two days after the court was stormed, thirty-eight days after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his ruling party were deposed, the Supreme Court deemed it appropriate to send a notice to the leader of the storming party, Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, president of his own Muslim League group and former head of government of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

We have heard no more about the 'buck' passed on by Justice Khan to the Islamabad Superintendent of Police. Is he still sitting on it? Where stands the matter today?

No redemption is in sight. As resignedly editorialized by this newspaper yesterday: "It is indeed a matter of shame for the successive governments in the country that they have done practically nothing to change the prevalent social attitudes towards women and improve their status. Until this is done, shameful episodes.... will continue to recur."

How well acquainted with the mettle of his coreligionists was Jinnah when he prophesied, over half a century ago, that each government of Pakistan will be worse than its predecessor.