AITZAZ Ahsan's days as the driver of the popular caravan in Punjab may be over. Until recently he was hailed as a straight politician and lawyer who had the guts and conscience to look beyond narrow party interests for the greater good of the country.

That was then. His current interpretation of the law that seems to allow parliament and the president certain rights and privileges has earned him jabs from the very people who fought alongside him for establishing the rule of law.

Aitzaz Ahsan had distanced himself from the PPP leadership and in the bargain earned for himself a place in the vanguard of the free-judiciary campaign. Somewhere along the way he made a vain attempt at reconciling politics at large with the politics of the bar but was snubbed by his fellow lawyers. Mr Ahsan was under house arrest at the time he came up with a formula that would have allowed people to contest the 2008 general election with a precondition that, once in parliament, they would vote for restoring Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and other deposed judges. One remembers that once Mr Ahsan had publicly elaborated on his formula a lawyer in Lahore accused him of losing touch with reality because of his confinement. Lawyers ignored the call for conditional participation and boycotted the polls.

Two years later, Mr Ahsan is again trying to bridge the gap between the politicians and the reformist bench. Again some of his colleagues in the bar are unhappy. They blame him for having confined himself to serving the interests of President Zardari. Mr Ahsan should know the price he might pay for his current appearance of someone who has diverted from the course taken by lawyers still high on the success achieved on the way to a true rule of law.

Mr Ahsan has attempted a balancing act before. When he left the PPP after the 1977 poll-rigging fiasco, he chose to join a party that went around wearing a progressive tag. Back in those days, politicians who could not get along with Z.A. Bhutto invariably ended up finding refuge in Asghar Khan's Tehrik-i-Istaqlal. Mr Ahsan did the same but returned to his old party many years afterwards to take up the mantle of a gentleman minister amongst 'a pack of crooks' when Benazir Bhutto came to power in 1988.

He retained the gentlemanly reputation in the face of serious attacks from the opposition. Most seriously, he was accused of having passed on secrets about Islamabad's backing of the Khalistan movement to the Indians during his tenure as the federal interior minister.

Perhaps these allegations were minor compared to what the barrister is today accused of siding with someone as far away from the camp of the purists in Pakistan as the president of this country.

With his long years of being a moderate in the midst of jiyalas, Mr Ahsan should understand that in Lahore where he practises his politics, a candidate who has the blessings of the PPP and its political opponents at the same time is unheard of. You are either a PPP man or you are not.

The last election that Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan fought in Lahore, in 2002, should serve to illustrate this point. He supposedly enjoyed the support of the PML-N in that election yet was confronted by an unheralded challenge from a certain Allama Abid Jalali. In the end, the margin of victory for Mr Ahsan was a mere 3,000 votes. Few if any of the diehard Leaguers had appeared to have voted for him, the celebrated Sharif lawyer.

Is it this polarisation that compels Mr Aitzaz Ahsan to remain in his camp? To the contrary, the so-called shift in his views and in that of many other pro free-judiciary lawyers who may or may not be close to the PPP may be due to a realisation of the dangerous curve the country is at due to tensions between the judiciary and executive. Mr Ahsan and other lawyers who are counselling restraint have joined others who have been calling for balance and some judicious activism since long. They deserve a patient hearing regardless of which camp they are placed in.