After getting unwittingly bogged down in political tussles, the Supreme Court – and the Chief Justice in particular – solemnly promised the nation that the apex court will not get involved in cases with political implications. Yet here we stand once again in the wake of another mammoth Supreme Court ruling – one that is doing more politicking for the concerned parties than they have been able to do themselves.

Nawaz Sharif has been “disqualified” once more – this time from party leadership of the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N), and all his decisions as party leader declared null and void. While the far reaching effects of this ruling – on matters such as the nomination of Shahid Khaqqan Abbasi as Prime Minister to the selection of Senate candidates – is a problematic debate in its own right, the question that needs to be answered at this moment is: how far will the apex court go to curate the upcoming 2018 general election, and how far should it be allowed to go?

Even as the debate between the Supreme Court and the Parliament over the clash of institutions raged on – over the court’s increasing and erratic involvement in executive affairs – the verdict was delivered; throwing in sharp relief the problems caused by such involvement. Judiciaries in most democracies explicitly avoid cases which might tilt the political equation in the favour of one party – Pakistan’s apex court seems to relish such opportunities.

The legal reasoning will be extensively contested and debated in the coming weeks but the effect of the verdict is immediate. The political machinery of both Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) and the PML-N have gone into overdrive to deal with this new development.

And while the PTI has all the reason to celebrate another judicial endorsement of its narrative, the greater beneficiary might turn out to be the PML-N. Nawaz Sharif – already disqualified from public office – has lost little; the tittle of the party president has been taken away but he still retains the power to make most decisions for the party, making him the de facto leader regardless of official status.

What he gains is much more significant; another affirmation of the PML-N narrative that paints the Supreme Court as too involved and agenda driven as well as a massive boost to the victim narrative that has been working so well for the party in recent times. Every time Imran Khan praises the Supreme Court the narrative is further affirmed and each oath to ‘parliamentary supremacy’ and ‘institutional restraint’ by the Supreme Court now seems suspect in retrospect.

With the bent it is in – and the cases that lie before it – the judiciary set to drop another few bombshells like this before the coming election – a deplorable fact in a nascent democracy such as ours.