JINNAH’S INAUGURAL SPEECH as the President of the Constituent Assembly is considered amongst his most important, one ‘in which he clearly outlined the ideal and concept of Pakistan, its constitutional structure, and the hopes and aspirations of its people’.1

Pakistan’s leading commentator on constitutional law and his­tory laments Jinnah’s death almost immediately after Partition for hav­ing robbed the nation of a meditative force that would have enforced ‘a due sense of proportion to moderate selfish aspirations and, above all, to convince the elite that the drawing up of a constitution pre­sented a task which the nation must quickly undertake’.^{[72] [73] He goes on nonetheless to acknowledge that the substantive preoccupations of these politicians were quite serious and included ‘how power was to be divided between the centre and the provinces and between East and West Pakistan’.}

In presenting a political history of these early years, this chapter simply schematises these factors to suggest that there are three tenden­cies that converge in the early years of Pakistan’s existence to explain its frequent and cyclical oscillations between democracy and militarism and the absence of a fuller flourishing of a progressive agenda that would afford distributive and formal justice for its citizens.

The first tendency is the empowerment of a military-bureaucratic elite, early on in the service of the executive powers of a constitu­tionally-guided state, but one which increasingly felt itself capable of bypassing constitutional rigidity altogether. The second is the sidelining of regional demands, which circumvented in the longer run a need to address progressive redistributive politics, perforce framed in the lan­guage of local inequity or provincialism. Lastly, the espousal of a state religion within the structure of a liberal constitutionalism thereafter marked a challenge for the coexistence of, at times, radically contrary normative orders.

In all, Pakistan has had three formal constitutions, passed in the years 1956, 1962 and 1973. This chapter provides an overview of the political context in which each was authored. The factors identified as influencing the course of early state development continued to impact the shape of constitutional and political developments in the country through to the passage of the Constitution of 1973. They continue to have resonance in the many shape-changing alterations made to the Constitution, as well as the less formal mechanics by which social goods are distributed throughout the polity.

I.