Rage of Caliban.

Byline: Adeel Wahid

THE lawyers in Pakistan have gone rogue; that much is undisputed. Unless obviously one asks a lawyer, especially a proud member of a bar council or an officer bearer of a bar association, who feels that the ground is being pulled away from under the lawyers' feet. There is rage in lawyers that the chambers constructed in Islamabad, on land not their own, but, at times, passed on from lawyer to lawyer for consideration, were dismantled; there is rage that the act was done in the wee hours of the night, when there was not enough lawyer manpower to safeguard the chambers, and there is rage that no notice was given before the demolition took place. Lawyers, who considered themselves bona fide purchasers of the chambers, on a basis of an ownership right created out of thin air by the local bar association, were left holding the bag.

And now there is rage emanating out of lawyers from all corners of Pakistan. It got manifested in the form of a rampage on the Islamabad High Court. The fraternity of lawyers clubbed in the echo-chambers of councils and associations, has repeatedly shown that the fraternity strictly abides by tribalistic values: you mess with one or a few, you mess with all. In fact, even when a member of the fraternity is called out for his illegality, the others barge in, full of rage, to provide cover.

The rage that the lawyers experience, however, is like the rage, as Oscar Wilde put it, of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

It is not, obviously, that there is something wrong in the South Asian gene of lawyers that makes them myopically self-centred, and perpetually angry. The system seems to be structured in a way, where there is a greater tendency for the members of bar councils and office-bearers of the associations to remain populists, often employing Schmittian friend-enemy dichotomy, to keep the internal cohesion of lawyers alive.

Under the Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Act, 1973, the elected provincial, Islamabad and Pakistan bar councils, have been granted the function, among others, of conducting elections of the bar councils. They have also been tasked with admitting advocates on a roll, or in other words granting the permission to individuals to appear before the courts on behalf of litigants. Third, they have been assigned the role of entertaining and determining cases of misconduct against lawyers.

Lawyers have shown that the fraternity abides by tribalistic values.

Elected bodies...