“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........

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