Emergency to emergency, the capture of the Lawyers’ Movement
Dawn · Asad Rahim Khan ·
The Lawyers’ Movement needed a judge to rally behind, a press to broadcast it and parties willing to march. Pakistan in 2026 has none of these.
“The first two days in Attock were the worst moments of my life,” senior lawyer Muneer A. Malik writes of his imprisonment during General Pervez Musharraf’s emergency rule in 2007. “I was completely cut off from the rest of the world, and my only contact was with the mushaqati.”
But the mushaqati—who was serving the final two weeks of his two-year narcotics possession sentence—had been around long enough to know how to smuggle messages out. Though he had no pen or paper, he plucked a red rose, squeezed the petals to fashion a nib, and had Mr Malik write a phone number “in rose ink” on his undershirt.
Soon enough, the terrible conditions of Mr Malik’s confinement were beamed to the public on private television channels. Word reached as far as a brother in the United States.