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“IN my country, as in yours, public men are proud to be the servants of the state and would be ashamed to be its masters,” exclaimed Sir Winston Churchill during his address to a joint session of the US Congress in 1941.
In a modern democratic society, those who enter public office are deemed to be public servants. Be it a member of a legislative body, a bureaucrat, a magistrate, a law-enforcement official or any other person invested with a portion of the state’s sovereign powers, they are all considered to be trustees of public power and expected to exercise their powers with a sense of fiduciary duty.
Recently in the case of ‘Muhammad Bux vs the State’, the Supreme Court depreciated the use of the term ‘bakhidmat janab’ (‘at the service of’) in applications to the station house officer. It held that “formulaic addressals like ‘bakhidmat janaab SHO’ are remnants of a colonial and pre-constitutional paradigm” and added “it is not the citizen at the service of the SHO, rather it is the SHO at the service of the citizen”. Previously, the Supreme Court in the case of ‘Shaukat Ali vs State Life’ had also depreciated the use of prefixes such as ‘honourable’ for judges or courts. Justice Qazi Faez Isa openly expressed his hostility at the use of words such as ‘sahab’ while referring to state officials, and admonished whosoever used it.
Officials in a legal system, especially judges and lawyers, ought to use the language of the Constitution and the law, and avoid superfluous prefixes and suffixes. Language can be a barrier in the realisation of rights and reinforce non-existing hierarchies, while shaping institutional approaches. Therefore, the issue can and should be appropriately addressed.
Why can’t we reciprocate the language of respect?
However, to excessively concentrate on language as the barrier would necessarily mean losing the larger plot. Pol Pot was referred to as ‘brother number one’, Kim Il Sung as ‘fatherly leader’, Joseph Stalin as ‘Comrade Stalin’, yet all of them were atrocious dictators.
Though Stalin was referred to as ‘comrade’, that did not prevent him from orchestrating ‘the great purge’, ‘the gulags’ and other forms of systematic and ethnic cleansing, resulting in the death of over 20 million civilians during his reign.
What is needed is a cultural attitude that inculcates the concept of service in public men. Merely addressing someone in language which sounds more egalitarian, socialist or dispassionate, will not instil the character of service in public men.
I vividly recall sitting in the court of Justice Yahya Afridi, when he was the chief justice of the Peshawar High Court. An elderly dishevelled man, who was not so well dressed and certainly not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, came up to the rostrum wearing broken slippers. As the hearing progressed, Justice Afridi dealt with him politely, and continuously referred to him as ‘sahab’ while issuing directions to the reader and court staff. It later became apparent to me that everyone was a ‘sahab’ in Justice Afridi’s court, even if you were poor, shabby or underprivileged.
For most litigants attending court is a daunting task, aggravated more so if you are not sure whether you will come out of court with your dignity intact, as many judges in Pakistan’s history had a habit of giving litigants and officials a ‘dressing down’.
I understand the Supreme Court’s noble intent to do away with terms such as ‘sahab’, however the alternative view which I propagate is that; if the official is a ‘sahab’, then the litigant or citizen is also a ‘sahab’. Why can’t we reciprocate the language of respect, rather than upend that polite language, which as I have said, is not necessarily the root cause of the lack of a public service attitude in public men?
I have seen the incumbent chief justice of Pakistan, despite holding such a high constitutional office, address others in letters as ‘respected sir’. This politeness does not diminish the position of the chief justice; it imbues it with humanity. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt were known to address letters to citizens commencing with the words ‘my dear sir’ or ‘dear madam’.
Terms of address such as ‘my lord’, ‘your honour’ and ‘your lordship’, regularly employed in court are, in my view, egalitarian because the lawyers who employ them are reciprocally referred to by the court as ‘learned counsel’, ‘worthy counsel’ or ‘able counsel’. Had it been one-way extolment, the position would have been otherwise.
A sense of civic duty and service in public men can coexist with ‘winning manners’, and need not necessarily be sacrificed at the altar of creating a more egalitarian society.
The writer is a practising barrister.
Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2026
