After the painful struggles against four democratic regimes in 10 years, the judi­ciary was more than ready to welcome the coup of General Musharraf.

This time, the judiciary had its own agenda, as prescribed by the good governance paradigm. To implement it, it was necessary to restore the ‘juridico-bureaucratic’ structure.

The strength, role and morale of the judiciary as the custodian of a new phase of global modernity under the rubric of rule of law projects and good governance is evident from the papers presented at the International Jurists Conference Islamabad in 2006.^[1098] The juridico-bureaucratic structure had become so strong that the Opposition (the Pakistan People’s Party and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz) insisted that the judiciary’s powers must be put in check before democracy can be restored. The bar associations were upset with the judiciary-military bureaucracy alliance and, at its height, published a blunt white paper in 2003.^[1099] The Opposition could, however, only act when a deal was signed internationally between the PPP and the western powers as well as when the Charter of Democracy was signed between the two main opposition parties (Pakistan People’s Party and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz).

This class formation caused cracks in the juridico-bureaucratic structure, which gave rise to the lawyers’ movement of 2007. After the success of the lawyers’ movement, in 2008, the judiciary was ready to go one step further, and argued for ‘constitutional governance’ and ‘constitutional democracy’ rather than parliamentary democracy. This concluded with the attempt to establish a ‘judicial dictatorship’.

5.1