ABSTRACT
At the very outset, please allow me to say that the public perception in Pakistan about the judges and parliamentarians is quite different from the experience of Western countries. This is so since there is an essential difference in the growth of parliamentary democracy in the West and in a neo-colonial society like Pakistan. In the West, parliamentary democracy emerged after the death of feudalism and the emergence of a new socio-economic order born out of the Industrial Revolution. In countries like ours, the old socio-economic order was prevailing when the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent was colonised by the British. These colonial masters enforced their own structure of the state and the institutions which were not linked with the economic base of the society. This is what has been described by one historian as an over-developed state structure in neo-colonial societies.
