WHEN considering the long march we should think not just in terms of kilometres from Lahore to the federal capital but also in terms of time.

`Mao`s archetypal Long March was over years and had its highs and lows with skirmishes won and lost. Attrition and fortitude characterised it. The lawyers` movement has already weathered two years and whatever the outcome this week — arrested or blocked; dharna or no dharna — the lawyers who have been keeping it going are heroic.

Take a bow from a grateful, if less courageous, spectator audience! People who want something other than the corrupt, cynical and self-serving to typify civil politics are indebted to these valiant standard bearers for the cause of constitutionalism and the rule of law in a democracy that is principled, not merely transitional. However controversial and punishing the process of marching becomes in a disoriented society, they will prevail.

For such is the political depravity in Pakistan that principle alone, not pragmatic guile, can guide us out of the mire. The lawyers` struggle ignited merely because of an individual, who, whatever his record before that, held to principle and resisted another individual, who, whatever his record before that, had become a power-driven predator.

The movement consolidated because the legal fraternity has organised professional solidarity — rather like the media which has also rebuffed onslaughts on its function, freedom and integrity though individuals may succumb. Of course, factoids and tactics are used with much success to intimidate, divide, slander and befuddle those who come in the way of bad governance; but the principle and urge for good governance is inextinguishable. The embers rekindle.

The year 2007 was also a moment in time where parties with organised political cadres were eager to regain the popular credence they had lost. Espousing the deposed chief justice and judiciary was clearly a popular cause. The emblematic movement, not the political parties nor the lawyers alone, built up the pressure, leading to elections.

In 2009, and in the driving-seat, the PPP and sundry coalition elements are now quite happy to bifurcate from the lawyers` movement. But the other main political party of Pakistan, the PML-N, has remained steadfast so far. The pre- and post-electoral configuration and context gave it an incentive to be jollied along by Benazir Bhutto`s widower. Since stepping into Musharraf`s vacated presidential office though, he has little need to cosy up to any particular team; and with governor`s rule in Punjab there is no reason for the Sharifs to cajole the PPP or bear with it.

The president must have understood that since he has enviable political craft. Why should he want to stir up what, for the authorities, is a hornet`s nest, in the foremost province of the federation his party`s prime minister is supposed to govern? Once again the PPP and the PML-N are eyeball to eyeball, vindicating those who said the two could never maintain a constructive national coalition or respect provincial turfs.

The PML-N is aggressively on the march and the PPP and its endorsers are no longer with the kind of constitutionalism that was visualised for a democratic Pakistan in 2007. Does this mean that the lawyers` movement risks annexation by one or the other warring party? Or that, unless its adherents confine themselves to press statements and TV talk and stay in their armchairs and off the streets, they will be packed into jails by the administration, with recourse to the post-November 2007 judiciary for relief?

The paradox is that to succeed the lawyers` movement can be neither politically aligned, nor apolitical and unaligned. It cannot be apolitical in a country where the political system and culture itself is a threat to the public weal. Nor can it take any one political side, for no political party is fully up to snuff and, equally, no political party can be unconditionally condemned.

Nor is there cause to marvel that parties like the PPP and the ANP, whose leaders suffered most cruelly at the hands of a deviant judiciary, are today practically if not theoretically underwriting the subservient judiciary inherited from Musharraf and thereafter enlarged by his successor.

Remember that it was Bhutto who instituted the Hyderabad Tribunal to take care of the likes of the late Wali Khan and Mir Ghaus Buksh Bizenjo. That Gen Zia had the same Bhutto perspective on the purpose of a superior judiciary (for all that the general overturned the Hyderabad Tribunal) that sent Bhutto to the gallows.

Remember that the JI (Jamaat-i-Islami) ranged against President Zardari today is the same JI without which the 17th Amendment that gave President Musharraf tenure-hold could not have been. That it too, like Benazir Bhutto later, claimed transitional grace underlay the compromise. That Wali Khan`s son is quite comfortable with an overweening president whose politics rests entirely on Bhuttoism. And that the MQM has been in alliance with and against every political power, both overtly and covertly, in balancing and unbalancing the political seesaw.

So what does street power or the lack thereof signify in Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Quetta, Peshawar? In March 2009, is the official/unofficial choice for barbed-wire-container mode or midnight change? Can better politics evolve out of the transitional loop?

If Nawaz Sharif`s goons

stormed the Supreme Court, Benazir Bhutto sought control over judicial appointment in the Judges` Case. If the PPP has a mass following its founder devised the Federal Security Force to quash the `other` mass. More than 30 years down the line, are Pakistanis ready to take from Asif Zardari a waywardness challenged in Bhutto?

Everyone remembers too well how the PNA movement culminated in Zia`s martial law. Nawaz Sharif is left choosing between being held responsible for aggravating a law and order crisis in our battered country or facing denigration that he couldn`t mobilise its masses. Like Pakistan itself he is placed between the devil and the deep sea.

Rather than bewail some PPP choices which helped induce the present impasse, institutionally minded democrats may take advantage of the definitive enunciation of post-Benazir political intent and style. The presidential method has reminded Pakistan`s civil society just how much it owes and needs the lawyers` movement. If it loses impetus, common citizens could wind up living in a state of subjugation in the independent country their forefathers established, more debasing and scary than any their predecessors experienced in British India. Lawyers — please win their case for blind justice whose only necessity is equity!