This will also be directly proportional to the ham-handedness of the ruling party's administrative minions. The protest was emotional and intense, and those who waited for over 24 hours in the car park of the Lahore High Court registered vociferous opposition to one-man rule. They constituted, for the most part, lawyers.

People are generally ambivalent about lawyers, with honourable exceptions, and first and foremost one must include the Quaid among these exceptions. Lawyers do not generally inspire confidence in the Pakistani community. To quote Dr. Mohd Nawaz from his letter to Col Riaz Jafri, "The lawyers are a very special class, in addition to their political leanings and prejudices, one major problem with demonstrating black jackets is their intellectual bankruptcy in terms of understanding the issues in a broader national and international context. I have always believed that the lawyers are very narrowly focused on rules, without connecting them to the social environment. Unfortunately, any situation into which they get involved always become messy and complex.

They lack the intellectual agility to apply laws to resolve the social issues. They have memorized from their books the concepts like the independence of judiciary but have never tried to understand that how thee concepts are to work properly in a social framework. There is a total disconnect between the legal concepts that they tend to scream and the social environment in which these concepts are practiced." Though one does not agree with Dr. Nawaz verbatim, his observations do represent the common perception among both the intelligentsia and masses in Pakistan.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry continues to give adequate reason to be admired. Any man who stands up against the odds and defies rampant authority if he believes authority is not being exercised judiciously deserves our admiration. The CJ has conducted himself extremely well throughout the crisis, and above all he has not lost his cool.

In the Ingall Hall of the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) it is written, "it is not what happens to you that matters, but how you behave while it is happening!" The Honourable CJ is a good enough speaker, all of what he said was true and had to be said, every law abiding, patriotic citizen of the country will endorse his views. For the lawyer community, the Chief Justice has become an icon; even among the general public the welcome and the applause was neither orchestrated nor manipulated. It was the genuine article, "the real thing!" One can say that the Honourable CJ has caught the imagination of the public. His defiance has made him an underdog, and the world loves an underdog.

One must to objective about all the facts. Look at the video coverage of the cavalcade passing through every town on the GT road; one side of the road remained open for traffic, which is quite impossible in spontaneous situations.

Lahore's crowd was indeed big, commentators compare it to Ms Benazir's arrival in Lahore in 1986 and Mian Nawaz Sharif's triumphant entry into the city after the May 28, 1988, nuclear explosion. One must conclude that, while there was no doubt about the size, the protest was not overwhelming.

The government, for once, was politically sensitive in not being stupid by placing hurdles between Islamabad and Lahore. That would have been catastrophic, and would have meant sudden death for the government if violence had taken place and the situation had gone out of control.

In fact, the political element in the CJ's camp must have hoped that any such incident would lead to the situation escalating out of control. The government deserves some credit for allowing the pent-up steam to escape by letting all and sundry vent their grievances in public.

While the CJ has every right to address Bar Councils, one has to respectfully state that he cannot, in all conscience, call his speeches in the present circumstances being anything but political, particularly when political speeches were the order of the day.

All around him political activists abounded, albeit with those lawyers who have only legal discipline as their profession. When Marc Anthony requested Brutus and his fellow conspirators to be allowed to give the funeral oration for the assassinated Julius Caesar, he was cautioned not to be political, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him!"

He then proceeded into history as one of the great political speeches ever. The CJ's speeches were as much political as Antony's funeral oration, and as much as I admire the man, the fact remains that he has now become a political figure of some consequence in Pakistan, and we should start getting used to having lost this great judicial activist from the Supreme Court Benches, and I for one feel sorry about it. One can already see him as a consensus opposition candidate for the presidential elections later this year.

The CJ is human, and Pakistani, and while praising the lawyers for being at least LLBs, he took a cheap shot at the officer corps of the armed forces by talking about "under matrics, matriculates etc." For the record, no officer can get his (or her) commission without either a BA or BSc degree, and again, for the record, both the curriculum and the teaching standard in PMA (and equivalent) is above the general norm in universities in Pakistan.

Field Grade officers i.e. a Major, must qualify for the Command & Staff Course by getting a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree. General Officers cannot attain that rank (i.e. Major General and above) unless they have a Masters Degree from the National Defence University (formerly National Defence College (NDC)).

The perception now rampant among the armed forces is that he hates the Khakis! If he has political aspirations he must remember that much as he may desire democracy, the armed forces will have their say in Islamic countries like Pakistan, Turkey, etc.

There is seething resentment among the masses at the attitude of some among the ruling clique, particularly the agencies, that they can get away with anything. As for the president's close advisors, the less said the better. Every time he listens to them, and their advice is usually motivated, he gets into trouble, and the country along with him gets into a crisis.

If the president has to seek advice, why not choose the best that is on offer rather than rely on the motivated "yes-men" around him. Bad people usually give advice as bad as they are. The president has been inadvertently placed at a critical crossroads, only a few months before his re-election. The Honourable CJ's defiance will make power-sharing come about sooner then later, in the power-sharing arrangement one believes Pervez Musharraf still has a role to play.

Ikram Sehgal is an eminent Pakistani political analyst and columnist.