Every self-appointed ruler in Pakistan has more often than not had a rollicking time as long as he was basking under his very own self-styled dispensation coupled with an element of self-glorification and a consequential self-adulation. The people of Pakistan have had to in all these years to put up with a long and unabated line of such self-appointed rulers who usurped power and sat on the Pindi-Islamabad takht from time to time and the latest one having been in the very person of the rather flamboyant and jumpy Gen Pervez Musharraf who continued holding tenuously on to the reins of power in Pakistan for almost a whole decade without having any representative capacity whatsoever of his own. During his nearly nine years or so in power in Islamabad and being the recent-most self-styled ruler that the people of Pakistan have had to suffer, he perpetuated his unrepresentative dominance over Pakistan's affairs during a longish but unproductive period during which he managed to navigate his way about things with the active back-up support and assistance of the Americans through all the trappings of Islamabad and thus began to lay the groundwork for establishing a personal oligarchy bearing his very own stamp and in the process carrying on merrily towards converting Pakistan into a tin-pot dictatorship of the Latin American variety and hang on to power on his Islamabad saddle if possible on an infinite basis. Had it not been for an independent and strong-minded Chief Justice of Pakistan refusing to toe Gen. Musharraf's line, by now Pakistan's fledgling and weak democratic and legal arrangements would indeed have folded up and completely packed up having suffered the sort of damage from which recovery is extremely difficult if not impossible. The Chief Justice's historical stand against Gen Musharraf's meddling into judicial matters backed up by a spontaneous surge of public support through a monumental chance combination taking place of a lawyers' movement coinciding with a peoples' movement that was constantly in search of and on the look-out for a new and invigorated Pakistan wherein the concepts of justice and fair play as enunciated by its great Founder Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah once again got into working order and thus became available to the people of Pakistan through the law courts that were duly established for administering justice to the people of Pakistan. When the country's law courts finally stood up to the bossing of Gen Musharraf the tide that was till then running against the people of Pakistan and first got indeed first slowed down and then got truly reversed and lo and behold that was the opening that the people of Pakistan had been waiting for decades on end to happen and finally it did indeed happen and that was the break-through that they fully waited for and they took it with both hands there was prevalent in actual practice the concept of the judicial independence of the courts of law that would also be symbolic of a Pakistan carrying henceforth a clean image along with having a clean government. These factors all of them coming together saved the day not only for Pakistan in its quest for being internationally respected as a truly civilized state but also one that ensured the country's highest credentials so that credentials for rubbing shoulders with the established democracies of the world. Gen Musharraf's attempts at meddling in and emasculating the judiciary having been successfully resisted and defeated and his undemocratic regime now has virtually no scope whatsoever of staging any comeback of any sorts. He has indeed been effectively booted out from power and been effectively consigned to the pages of the history books in the process of having been ousted from power comprehensively and completely that he will be best advised to never even contemplate of even remotely trying to make anything even resembling a comeback effort of sorts because that would indeed have no chances whatsoever of any success. The writer is a former Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister.