By M Ilyas Khan
BBC News, Islamabad
When Pakistan’s former military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, ended his four-year exile and returned to the country to participate in May’s elections, he took many people by surprise.
He had made many powerful enemies during his eight-year rule, and some of them had been in power or were about to be.
Besides, a slew of criminal charges had been lying dormant against him in various courts, awaiting his return.
But on Monday, a court granted him bail in the last of the four criminal cases instituted against him, paving the way for his release.
How he managed to turn what many had considered a miscalculation, into a legal triumph can be partly explained by the shifting nature of the country’s political and judicial systems.
He obviously returned to Pakistan thinking he had done no wrong.
He also believed that his party could win some seats in parliament on the strength of an economic bubble his policies had created in the services sector in urban areas.
In addition, he knew that the country’s powerful military, of which he had been the head until 2008, would not allow the politicians and the judges to drag him through the courts and convict him as a criminal.
Many thought he had miscalculated because the judges that he sacked in 2007 had been swept back to their positions by a wave of popular agitation that forced him out of power in 2008.
