Archive for the 'Chaudhri Mohammad Ali' Category

The Coup, The Constitution, and the Bureaucratic Musical Chairs - 2/3 (1955-58)

Athar Osama July 9th, 2007

The Constitution 

Having looked at the “Constitutional Coup” of 1954 and its repurcussions in the form of Justice Munir’s historic judgment, we now turn towards the Pakistan’s renewed quest for a Constitution.

An Era of Legal Challenges

With Justice Munir’s verdict in the Tamizuddin Khan case, not only did the Constituent Assembly stood dissolved but also sevepk-p0715010101.jpgn long years of important legislation was eliminated by a stroke of a pen. Forty-six Acts on the statute books became invalid thus putting the country in a legal vacuum making it almost impossible to govern. Days after the judgment, the Governor-General promulgated Emergency Powers Ordinance IX of 1955 that give him the power to:

  • Make provision for framing the Constitution of Pakistan
  • Make provision to constitute the province of West Pakistan
  • Validate laws which have been passed by the Constituent Assembly but had not received assent of the Governor-General
  • Authenticate the Central Budget
  • Name East Bengal as East Pakistan      (Khan, 2001, p. 89)

Governor-General’s Emergency Powers Ordinance was immediately challenged in the court. In Usif Patel vs. The Crown, Chief Justice Munir sided with the petitioner and declared the Emergency Powers Ordinance IX of 1955 as ultra vires (without legal authority). In a major flip-flop of his earlier decision, Justice Munir’s judgment recognized the continuing authority of the Constituent Assembly, and nobody else, to make any provisions to the country’s Constitution. Ironically, this was the same Constituent Assembly that had stood dissolved through his decision in the Tamizuddin Khan case.

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The Coup, the Constitution, and the Bureaucratic Musical Chairs - 3/3 (1955-58)

Athar Osama July 9th, 2007

…The Bureaucratic Musical Chairs

With the Constitution now in effect, there was logically an expectation that it would lead to an end to the constant reshuffling of governments and political leaders over the last few years and bring political stability to Pakistan. Before going into whether or not that ultimately happened, lets look briefly look at some aspects of the constitution that are worth emphasizing here. 

The Constitution of 1956

pk-163px-Iskander_mirza.jpgThe Constitution of 1956 was a lengthy document—containing over 234 Articles in 13 parts and 6 schedules. By contrast, the American Constitution has a 3-line preamble, 7 articles, and 27 amendments over the last 200 years of existence. The Indian Constitution, on the other hand, has 395 articles and 12 schedules (Wikipedia, 2007). Clearly, in Pakistani Constitution of 1956, but also later ones, the framers adopted an approach, somewhat analogous to India’s, that explicitly stated many of the things that are generally left to convention in most well-developed constitutions of the world. Hamid Khan identifies several reasons for the length of the constitution including, but not limited to, complicated relationship between the federation and the provinces, special provisions for tribal areas and the Islamic character of the Constitution, emergency provisions, bill of rights, issues of state languages, election commission, and directive principles of state policy etc. (Khan, 2001, p. 102).

There is nothing inherently right or right, perhaps, about explicitly stating in quite a lot of minutiae the various structures that comprise the state and their inter-relationships with each other provided there is consistency between them and that the Constitution is then properly and fully implemented. Pakistan’s First Constitution and the later experienced presented serious problems in both these counts.

The first set of problems arose in the distribution of power between the President and the Prime Minister. The 1956 Constitution was developed and delivered during the Governor-Generalship of Iskander Mirza and the Prime Ministership of Chaudhri Mohammad Ali. While the latter was an able person—and perhaps a man of good integrity (more on this later)—the former’s strong control over power and desire to maintain that was no match to the latter’s independence and/or desire to create a well-designed (from a structural standpoint) Constitution.

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Complete Text: Pakistan’s First Constitution of 1956

Understanding Pakistan Project Team July 9th, 2007

With an objective of creating a comprehensive repository of materials here, I was looking for the complete text of Pakistan’s first Constitution. Haven’t been able to find one. Here is the best I could do. I have some excerpts from most important sections and parts of the Constitution. Should anybody from the audience have access to the complete text, or commentaries on the first constitution UPP would be interested in putting in on. -Ed.  

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THE CONSTITUTION OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF PAKISTAN

Excerpts and Summary (adopted from Keith Callard, Pakistan: A Political Study, Allen and Unwin, 1957, pp.355)

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