12 May: the bloodshed and watershed

On 12 May, Pakistan had its Black Sabbath. It turned out to be more bizarre than the surreal happenings that had preceded it, which included the takeover of the sole children's public library by hordes of black-hooded women, a mosque imam referring to the female students in Pakistan's premiere public university as prostitutes, and law-enforcement personnel dragging the country's chief justice by his hair. And all this in the capital, regarded as quite removed from the hurly burly of Pakistan's agitational politics!

Saturday, 12 May will go down in history as a shameful day for Pakistan. On that day, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who had been abruptly deposed by General Pervez Musharraf on 9 March on spurious charges, was to address the legal practitioners of the Sindh High Court, in Karachi. On arriving at the Karachi airport, Chief Justice Chaudhry was detained for nine hours, before finally being put back on a plane bound for Islamabad. The entry points to roads from the airport to the High Court had been blocked by hundreds of trucks, buses and containers, orchestrated by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), one of Musharraf's key support bases. Armed MQM thugs, with the tacit support of the MQM-dominated Sindh government, had also coerced lawyers and opposition party activists not to show their support for the suspended chief justice. One observer commented that even the Pakistan Army could not have so successfully halted life in Karachi.