Pakistan had witnessed this  clash of powers and  interests when  the then President of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf  went to  the extent of placing the Supreme  Court Judges and the Chief Justice of Pakistan under house arrest in 2007. Luckily for the cause of democracy, the lawyer community had rallied behind the judges and General Musharraf's bloated ego had to take a beating.

That clash had taken place because Pakistan was not a mature democracy and even now it isn’t. Of the 64 years that Pakistan has been in existence, the army has staged three coups and ruled the country. I am sad to say that a weak-kneed Judiciary of Pakistan had kowtowed before the generals and carried out their diktats like a subordinate court. The Supreme Court of Pakistan had bent backwards to put its seal of approval on the military coups of which the biggest beneficiary was the army, not the citizens. It was not until Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary, Chief Justice of Pakistan, asserted the prerogatives of the third pillar of democracy that the generals realised that good governance meant rule of law. The age-old dictum is: However high you may ever be, law is above you.

Let 19th January come and the world will see whether Pakistan is maturing into a democracy and observing rule of law. If the high and mighty flouts the law, the country's governance will receive one more jolt.

What are the options before Prime Minister Gilani? Well, to appear before the 7-judge bench and plead the case. He may not do so because it may involve his incarceration. His second option is to go in the lap of the Parliament and seek protection of the legislature, a powerful wing enjoying constitutional powers, refuse to appear before the Supreme Court and let a crisis develop.

There is a catch here. The Supreme Court may find the Prime Minister guilty of contempt of Court and sentence him to imprisonment and force him to leave the high office as a convict. The army may step in and force the Prime Minister to obey the orders of the Supreme Court. It will be a kind of coup under the orders of the Supreme Court and the army will save itself from the stigma of carrying out the fourth coup that it had been wanting to but was reluctant due to international factors.

President Asif Ali Zardari is bound to get the support of PM since Gilani is an active member of the PPP, his own political party. Thus the crisis of a Himalayan magnitude is in the making as we can see now.

No soothsayer

It would be rather pre-mature on the part of a legal luminary of Pakistan or India or another western democracy to say for sure what would happen on 19th January 2012. Wise people observe and study but do not express an opinion pre-maturely.