No-one probably remembers. I do. The occasion was many years ago – in the last century in fact – when the then British High Commissioner Sir Nicholas Barrington invited me to speak to the Asian Study Group in Islamabad. The topic, he suggested, should be UK-Pak relations.
That evening, Sir Nicholas sat in the front row, flanked by the Russian and another ambassador. I began by saying that if there was any single event that shaped our historical ties, one would have to go back to 54 BCE, when the first Roman soldier stepped on the shores of Rome’s newest colony, Brittania.
In the wake of that roman soldier, came Roman culture, Roman civics, Rome’s language (Latin), and Roman Law. For centuries thereafter, it was Roman Law that was taught at the Inns of Court in London. Four particular barristers from the subcontinent who benefited from this education were M. A. Jinnah, J. Nehru, M.K. Gandhi, and Z. A. Bhutto.
Over the years, the tenets of Roman Law, modified by the precedents derived from English Common Law, became the template of our judicial system, just as the British Indian civil service provided the ‘steel frame’ for our own administrative structure.
Just over fifty years ago, in April 1973, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (assisted by his Law Minister Abdul Hafeez Pirzada) birthed a Constitution. It had a difficult infancy. Within its first four years, it underwent seven surgeries. The latest amendment (the 27th), regarded by some specialists as fatal, has been endorsed by Bhutto’s grandson Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari and signed into law by Bhutto’s son-in-law President Asif Zardari.
It has been alleged that many of our legislators had not even read the text of the 27th amendment before passing it. Nevertheless, their actions are legally binding. To some, that is true democracy in action. To others, it is a distortion of the late Benazir Bhutto’s assertion that ‘Democracy is the best revenge’. The 27th Amendment has been adopted in haste. Legislators have left it to their constituents to repent at leisure.
The Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi once defined democracy as a tripod of ‘the executive, the legislature and the judiciary’. The world has forgotten Aung San Suu Kyi (a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, 1991). She has spent two decades in jail or under house arrest, defending the civil rights of 50 million of her compatriots. She has been in confinement almost as long as Nelson Mandela (another Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, 1993). He survived 28 years of incarceration.
Here, Benazir Bhutto endured nearly six years in jail or under detention, while her husband Asif Zardari was kept in prison for eleven years, before beginning his current term in the gilded cage of the presidency.
Anyone within the legal profession and outside it who has watched the gradual emasculation of the judiciary over the years cannot view the latest events with anything other than dismay. The ethical standards that distinguished Justice A. R. Cornelius or Justice Dorab Patel and many such principled adjudicators have evaporated into memory. Their black robes were not a symbol of detachment, of impartiality. They denoted gravitas and integrity.
Today, those robes have become a distracting camouflage. As one wit put it, ‘What many people forget is that judges are just lawyers in robes.’ They spar in public, like the noisy litigants who appear before them.
The latest Amendment has forced our democracy to stand on one leg. The American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton warned against such constitutional gymnastics: ‘Liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments’.
One of the key innovations in the 27th Amendment is the cloak of immunity granted to certain state functionaries. It could prove to be a pyrrhic victory, a perishable laurel. Immunity for life can never be assured, no more than Egyptian pharaohs could even over 5,000 years of effort guarantee themselves immortality.
The next general elections in Pakistan are due in May 2029. President Trump’s present term will end in January 2029. Until then, no voter in Pakistan should expect a change in the status quo. Our current Parliament has no intention of going anywhere, except in guided circles.
Commenting on a practice followed in the British House of Commons, the eminent British jurist Lord Denning – described by PM Margaret Thatcher as ‘probably the greatest English judge of modern times’ – observed that ‘the House of Commons starts its proceedings with a prayer. The chaplain looks at the assembled members with their varied intelligence, and then prays for the country’.
Pakistani voters should follow that chaplain’s example and start their day with a prayer for our hapless country.
F. S. AIJAZUDDIN
[DAWN, 20 Nov. 2025]
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