Constitutional Development in Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan’s constitutional evolution presents an intricate and fragmentary narrative, itself a palimpsest overlaying colonial heritage, periodic convulsions, judicial doctrines, and recurrent military abridgments. Since the 1947 partition, the effort to forge a resilient constitutional order capable of accommodating federalism, representing popular sovereignty, and upholding the rule of law has repeatedly faltered. Unlike certain post-colonial counterparts that experienced gradual constitutional consolidation, Pakistan’s evolution has alternated between the debut of grand constitutional moments and periodic interregna marked by abrogation, suspension, and externally directed amendment, occasioned by warring centres of authority the legislative, the executive, the judiciary, and the military.
This thesis charts constitutional evolution from the inaugural moment of independence to the present. It privileges an integrated analysis that appraises not only constitutional text, but also the underpinning institutional architectures, the prevailing distributive struggles, and the public reception that inform, accept, resist, transform, or simply ignore the formal edifice. Situating Pakistan’s narrative alongside the constitutional trajectories of selected postcolonial democracies India, Turkey, and South Africa the analysis discerns the distinct, even audacious, ruptures some foundational texts inaugurate, whilst simultaneously illuminating the recurrent motifs and common exigencies underlying constitutionalism in contexts of inherited hierarchies and liberal aspiration.