It was a bright spring morning in Islamabad of March 2007. The stage was a commotion on a road in the Red Zone involving blue-uniformed, metal-grey painted helmet-wearing posse of policemen surrounding someone nearly invisible to watchers. An accidentally well-placed photojournalist managed to, in the split-second available to him, capture an image that changed the course of contemporary national history. It showed a black suited mustachioed captive being rudely shoved into a car, a police officer contemptuously clutching his short-cropped hair in disdain.

The captive was then Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry who had refused to accept his sacking the previous day by the military dictator in power. When intercepted, he was on his way to the Supreme Court on foot as his car was taken away to prevent him from attending office.

This was the photo that launched a thousand news reports on the hundreds of protests by the lawyers’ community across Pakistan over the next several months that snowballed first into a movement and then into a political resistance that eventually resulted in the chief justice being reinstated, re-sacked and re-reinstated and the general finally vacating his labyrinth.

The photo captured in breathtaking simplicity the eternal quarrel of truth with power. Particularly in Pakistan’s context where the stakes are always high.

While this photo is considered one of the prime triggers of the Lawyers’ Movement, looking back closely a decade later provides a more nuanced picture of the sentiment of the campaign and its parental spontaneity. And also how widespread it was and what its objectives were even if they were, strictly speaking, not carved out before the Movement began but began crystallising only when it became clear that neither the general nor the judge would budge.

It was only a matter of ‘when’ the Lawyers’ Movement would be birthed, rather than ‘if’, after a bench headed by the chief justice halted the then General President Pervez Musharraf’s advanced plans to privatise the Pakistan Steel Mills.

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Stung by this, Musharraf sent a reference to the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) against Chaudhry and attempted a forced resignation from the latter by intimidating him through a show of uniformed force at the Aiwan-e-Sadr. When he refused, Musharraf sacked Chaudhry and put him in detention. The picture-worth-a-thousand-words triggered demonstrations, first by the bar council and association in Islamabad that within days spread to their counterparts in the provincial capitals.

For a couple of weeks, this remained an affair largely restricted to the legal fraternity who started shutting down work and focusing mostly on protests, first in the kutchehris and then on the roads. It was only after the Supreme Court judges declared Musharraf’s reference to SJC against Chaudhry illegal and a restored, defiant Chaudhry along with his fellow judges ordered state institutions to defy security orders by the ruling general that political parties openly jumped in the fray to support him.

This situation collided headlong with the critical mass of the attrition that the Musharraf regime had started acquiring. He had been in power for nearly eight years and had managed to, as most dictators do rather well, make enemies out of most stakeholders.

An otherwise neutralised political opposition saw their big chance and enthusiastically joined the lawyers in their attacks on the complacent arrogance of Musharraf who had overplayed his hand. The Rubicon was crossed when Aitzaz Ahsan, with his own stellar legal background, joined the sacked chief justice and infused a political strategy to the lawyers’ snowballing movement. As a result, this Movement transitioned from "Restore Chief Justice" to "Go Musharraf Go."

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This transition in the character of the Movement opened up the space for political parties to first express solidarity with the lawyers and then share the centre-stage with them, thereby making the Movement a full-blown political resistance. Aitzaz was aided in his political strategisation of the Lawyers’ Movement by a real-time visual media. While lawyers and politicians in Pakistan have a rich history of battling military dictators, this was the first instance that reporting of a resistance of this nature was being beamed live into homes across the country.

Taking advantage of this, Aitzaz employed his political acumen to create a near-continuous live TV coverage of the resistance by driving the sacked chief justice around in view of the cameras. This triggered a competition among bar associations and councils in various cities to host Chaudhry for whistle-stop speeches that turned into a living nightmare for Musharraf.

The beauty of this strategy was that it was no longer possible for lawyers and their bar councils and associations to sit on the fence anymore -- the chief justice was not very popular before his sacking since he was one of the judges who had validated Musharraf’s putsch in 1999 by taking oath of allegiance under the Provisional Constitutional Order and giving him powers to amend the constitution. The successful ‘politicisation’ of the Lawyers’ Movement into a broader political resistance made him the fulcrum of the resistance.

The whole Lawyers’ Movement, at least in its earliest stages, was neither spontaneous nor equal in its intensity in all the provinces. While initial anger against the chief justice’s sacking morphed into the spontaneity of protests, curiously enough full support for him of the legal community in Quetta, where Chaudhry had roots -- social, legal practice and then chief justice-ship in the Balochistan High Court -- took some time coming. It was the charismatic and irrepressible Ali Ahmed Kurd that helped convert an initially slow expression of support to the chief justice to an equal participation in the resistance against Musharraf.

For the many months that the Lawyers’ Movement remained active heightening and hardening sentiments of solidarity against Musharraf and the doubled resolve after Chaudhry was, as an outcome of the November 2007 state of emergency, sacked again, the battle-readiness of the lawyers was down to the democratic nature of its community.

Lawyers in Pakistan have always held their annual elections even during years of banned democracy under military dictators. This keeps the community tightly knit in terms of threat response. Whenever attacked, singly or collectively, the legal fraternity in Pakistan abandons their otherwise intra-community ideological divisions to fight back. The same happened when Chaudhry was sacked.

The Musharraf misadventure with Chaudhry is the biggest case study of the Pakistani lawyers eventually gelling together to dissolve their ideological divides for a cause that morphed from the primary reflex to get Chaudhry restored to defense of the independence of judiciary.

But what remains their biggest success story also paradoxically degenerated into a bitter legacy. Once the Movement ended, ironies proliferated. With Chaudhry back on the bench for a third time in two years, he became the very nightmare the Movement birthed the fight for: trouncing of power in the fight for supremacy of law. He became the most activist of Pakistani judges who ever had the privilege of sitting on the bench robed. He had had the better of a military dictator but extended his successful trophy hunt to a democratically elected prime minister (Gilani) and all but trounced the democratically elected president (Zardari). The military establishment did not need to unsettle the elected government. Chaudhry did it for them with a vengeance.

The romance of the Lawyers’ Movement soured not too late after Chaudhry was back in the saddle. It is telling that the faces of the Lawyers’ Movement -- Aitzaz Ahsan, Asma Jahangir, Ali Ahmed Kurd, Tariq Mehmood and Munir A Malik, all of whom have served as presidents of bar associations -- have become bitter critics of Chaudhry and borderline apologetic for having supported him. They have been at pains distancing themselves from a judge who struck at democracy with the same gusto that he exhibited defying a dictator -- he sent the man who restored him (Gilani) home and wants the man who forced his restoration (Sharif) ousted.

The stalwarts of the Lawyers’ Movement have been editing the historical narratives articulating it, explaining that it was a movement for the restoration of an errantly sacked chief justice, not for a chief justice who became errant after restoration. The sentiment about the Lawyers’ Movement, after all the emoting is over, is bitterness at the fact that the ultimate advertisement for the Movement is still Chaudhry who morphed from a one-time symbol of the independence of the judiciary to a sorry caricature of it and how not to preserve a legacy.