ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the history, development and legal transformations of Pakistan’s constitution. By selecting a few crucial constitutional events for harder analysis, it evaluates the manipulation of the constitution as symptomatic of Pakistan’s political culture. In other words, constitutional manipulation is, often, a result of different ideological approaches on managing the ‘foundational’ values and ‘contextual’ realities. Certainly, there are numerous other factors that exacerbate that tension, including the divisions of power and civilian–military relations. The military, especially, has always been in the background, pulled between these conflicting polarities, overseeing, and further complicating, the ideological tug-of-war. Mahmud goes as far to categorize Pakistan as ‘a praetorian state, one in which the military tends to intervene and potentially could dominate the political system … Constitutional changes are effected and sustained by the military, and the army frequently intervenes in the government’. 1 Yet, overall, Pakistan’s chronic constitutional crises are usually debated in either of three ways: first, Mahmud’s praetorian model, criticizing the military; second, Newberg’s claim of ‘incomplete constitution-making [that] has placed the burdens of constitutional interpretation on state instruments ranging from the bureaucracy to the military to the judiciary’; 2 third, Khan’s thorough characterization of constitutional crises being a by-product of its manipulation by elites, whether economic, political or military. 3 This chapter, developing from Khan, proposes a fourth reasoning that explores the ideological gradient of those ruling elites, irrespective of whether they are civilian or military. Actually, the confrontation between the secularists, traditionalists and revivalists, from the inception of the interim constitution until the removal of Nawaz Sharif’s second government and the military dictatorship of General Musharraf, provides ample evidence of ideological incoherence.
