Rigid on paper

SOME constitutions die by coup. Others are buried quietly, clause by clause, beneath the respectable cover of parliamentary arithmetic.

Pakistan’s Constitution is, we are told, rigid. Article 239 demands that any amendment be passed by a two-thirds majority of the total membership of each House of Parliament. Where provincial boundaries are touched, the relevant assembly must agree by the same margin. This is supposed to be the great lock on the constitutional door — protection against temporary passions, executive overreach, and rulers who cannot resist rewriting the rules of the game.

And yet, here we are again.

The 1973 Constitution has been amended 27 times. That number alone is not the problem. Constitutions are not museum pieces; they must breathe and respond to history. But there is a difference between amendment and renovation — and what Pakistan has often practised is closer to the latter, dressed up as the former. The real question is whether entrenchment means anything when institutions are hollow, conventions nonexistent, and a two-thirds majority can be quietly assembled overnight.

That is the quiet tragedy here: rigid on paper, fragile in the world.

A constitution can be amended by the book and still emerge diminished.

Consider the UK, which has no single written constitution at all. Its arrangements live across statutes, judgements, and long-standing conventions. Parliament, in theory, can do whatever it likes — there is no Article 239 at the door. And yet Westminster tends not to mistake legality for legitimacy. It would not simply abolish devolved institutions in Scotland or Wales because the votes were there. The Sewel Convention — the understanding that Westminster will not normally legislate on devolved matters without consent — has no legal force but carries genuine political weight.

Britain’s constitution is flexible but politically disciplined. Pakistan’s is rigid but politically exposed.

America offers the starker contrast. The Constitution of 1787 has seen just 27 amendments, the first 10 ratified together as the Bill of Rights in 1791. That durability has nothing to do with the document being untouchable. It comes from the amendment being understood as a serious national act, not a mechanism for the government of the day to tidy up inconvenient arrangements. Pakistan has reached the same count in roughly half the time. At this pace, 100th amendment will pass without ceremony, quietly buried in a gazette that nobody reads.

The 27th Amendment is the clearest example of what is at stake. It created a Federal Constitutional Court, restructured constitutional adjudication, entrenched the formal standing of military leadership, and handed lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution to the president and senior military officers. Supporters say it was a necessary reform. Critics call it institutional capture. What it cannot be called, in good conscience, is routine.

There are countries where constitutional courts work well. But borrowing institutional design without the political culture that makes it function is a familiar Pakistani mistake. The question was never only whether a new court was a good idea. It was who pushed it through, how quickly, and who stood to gain.

The amendment followed Article 239. Whether it followed the spirit of constitutionalism is the more important question. A constitution is not simply a list of permissions — it is also a set of restraints that are supposed to hold even when the numbers say they don’t have to. Pakistan has become fluent in the first reading and tends to forget the second.

Those who defend these amen­dments fall back on the same logic: the votes were there, the process was followed, what more do you want? But constitutional democracy is not arithmetic. Two-thirds does not launder coercion or transform speed into deliberation. The graver the change, the more the process owes the public in honesty and time.

Pakistan’s deeper failure has been to treat legality and legitimacy as the same thing. A constitution can be amended by the book and still emerge diminished. The document endures. The idea behind it may not.

Britain shows that an unwritten constitution can hold where political culture is strong. America shows that a written one can last where an amendment carries genuine gravity. Pakistan demonstrates something harder: that formal rigidity offers no real protection when the will to circumvent it is organised enough.

A constitution does not have to be torn up to be destroyed. It can be amended to death — slowly, legally, with full attendance in the chamber.

That is not a safeguard. That is the warning.

The writer is an advocate of the high courts and holds an LL.M. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2026

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