‘نیا قانون، نیا قانون کیا بک رہے ہو؟ قانون وہی ہے پرانا’-
‘What new law are you going on about? Law remains the same, old’.
-Saadat Hassan Manto (‘Naya Qanoon’)
Laws were once created to restrain those of the jungle. They were supposed to prevent an accumulation of resources with whoever was deemed fittest, until law itself became a resource the wealthiest and most powerful could hoard and abuse, by conquering nations and ruling over them. Our part of the world, too, has seen its fair share of invaders and colonisers, however, the dawn of democracy and constitutional law, promised a clean break; a system of government where power was not owned by the mightiest, only borrowed from the people, to represent and manifest their will. Years later the question still arises: if political power is formally given to the people but unequally distributed in practice, can the law avoid reproducing the very hierarchies of power it was supposed to dismantle?
Today, laws are made by a country’s legislature. In Pakistan that means a bi-cameral system where democratic representatives of citizens, first in the National Assembly and then in the Senate, debate, propose changes to and vote for or against a bill once it has been put forward by a member of the government. This democratic representation, and citizens’ confidence in it, is what gives these laws their relevance and efficacy; and it is what separates a democratic republic from what we now recognise as an authoritarian state.
However, hierarchies of power, based on economic class or social identities, do not need a formal authoritarian structure to manifest. They inevitably form when certain segments of society are denied adequate representation in the law-making process, either explicitly or implicitly, by failing to accommodate prevailing social inequities. Historically in Pakistan, positions of power in law making structures have been the subject of absurd controversies, from ‘Can a woman be head of state?’ to ‘Can we have non-Muslim judges in courts of law?’ In theory, and scarce practice, such biases have been rejected, with Benazir Bhutto becoming Prime Minister, and the Supreme Court of Pakistan remarking in 2007 that the constitution does not bar non-Muslim judges from serving as Chief Justice[1].
Unfortunately, representation loses its meaning and impact when it is merely theoretical, inconsistent, or scarce. Against a backdrop where such absurd questions routinely arise, the numbers show just how scarce that representation is: only 60 of 336 seats in the national assembly reserved for women, who form 117.15 million of Pakistan’s total population; worse still, only 10 of 336 seats are reserved for religious minorities, who make up 8.77 million people in Pakistan[2]. On top of that, there is no reservation of seats and consequently no representation in Parliament for the 21,700[3] intersex citizens of Pakistan whose social needs can only be understood by and legislated for, by those who have lived their reality.
There is also a clear correlation between who gets to make laws and the degree of economic security they enjoy. According to UNDP’s Pakistan National Human Development Report of 2020 titled, ‘The three Ps of inequality: Power, People, and Policy’ eight broad categories of people in Pakistan, namely: state owned enterprises, the military establishment, high net-worth individuals (the top 1% of earners nationwide), major traders, exporters, banks, industry, and the feudal class, hoard most of the country’s resources, legal and regulatory privileges. These privileged categories of people are tightly knit with the political elite through personal relationships, political lobbying and funding campaigns for political leaders, giving them a major hold over the country’s governance and law-making processes.
A major disconnect between the state and its citizens arises when these privileged classes make laws for people whose struggles they cannot even remotely relate to. Consider India’s Lok Sabha: in its current composition following the 2024 general elections, 148 of its 543 members identify as professional agriculturalists[4]. Yet, this false pretense of representation does not reflect the experiences of India’s agricultural workforce because most of these representatives are affluent landowners whose socioeconomic circumstances insulate them from the everyday realities of predatory lending, crushing debt, and climate vulnerability faced by small and marginal farmers and agricultural labourers. Starkly manifesting in 2024, when 10,546[5] agricultural labourers died by suicide, driven by debt and systemic negligence of their own representatives who supposedly constitute one fifth of the lower-house of parliament yet were unable to adequately legislate for their struggles. Worse still is when this inadequacy of representation enables instances where the operation of law itself systemically worsens economic disparity between socioeconomic classes, such as, when high margin business owners are able to utilise legal structures like the corporate veil to split profits between their private and corporate identities to reduce their effective income tax, or write off their corporate losses onto their personal tax returns, whereas a salaried worker cannot use high inflation or losses in personal investments to reduce their income tax, creating a disproportionately higher tax burden on working class citizens.
The question, then, is not whether the law was deliberately designed to concentrate wealth and power, nor whether democracy and constitutionalism have simply failed. Rather, it is whether the formal distribution of political power has translated into an equal capacity to exercise that power in practice. The right to vote, the right to representation, and the right to participate in law-making may be formally available to citizens, while the social and economic conditions necessary to make those rights meaningful remain deeply unequal. Political power may therefore be formally dispersed among the people without being equally accessible to them: some possess greater resources to influence legislators, navigate institutions, obtain legal representation, and secure the enforcement of their rights, while others encounter barriers at each of these stages. The resulting inequality can therefore, emerge from the gap between what the law promises equally and what citizens are actually equipped to claim from it.
Even if the law does not explicitly accumulate power in favour of economically secure segments of society, it does so implicitly through the neutrality of its application with impacts that are discriminatory. Frameworks like Diyat, or blood money, in Pakistan provide affluent parties with a legal route to avoid accountability; the destitute, by contrast, are left all the more vulnerable to blackmail, coercion, and forced compromises. Laws like the Punjab Vagrancy Ordinance 1958 empower the police to arrest individuals caught begging or lacking fixed abodes, without alternative welfare frameworks granting access to public housing, food or healthcare. The law in the manner in which it is enforced, including who enforces it and who stands before it, has also served as a tool to propagate an imbalance of power and resources. With no concept of jury trials in Pakistan, no judge of a religious minority on the Supreme Court or any of the five High Courts and only 7 female judges across all superior courts, against 119[6] male Muslim judges who dominate these courts, it is hard to call justice blind. It was not blind for Maira Shehbaz, a fourteen-year-old Christian child abducted at gunpoint and forced to renounce her faith and ‘marry’ one of her abductors, when the Lahore High Court overturned a lower court’s decision and ordered her to be returned to her abductor[7].
In its manner of application the law reiterates both class structures and prevailing social biases, with leniency reserved for the privileged and justice reserved for ‘perfect victims’. Street crimes motivated by hunger and destitution are punished with severe prison sentences whereas ‘white-collar crime ‘ committed by the affluent classes sees significantly higher rates of probation, home or community confinement. This is largely because of how the law is designed; but factors such as access to legal counsel and to law enforcement and justice-dispensing institutions also affect how ostensibly neutral laws end up having class-based impacts.
In Pakistan the same is true for vulnerable identities: a woman, a non-Muslim, or a transgender individual will find it harder to access justice regardless of financial means. Following the arrest of an ASI in the Ghaziabad police station of Lahore for sexually assaulting a 19-year-old girl on police station premises, Faisal Kamran, DIG Operations in Lahore, issued a directive discouraging women from visiting police stations ‘after Maghrib’[8]. Each case of gender-based violence or sexual assault, in the off chance that it is reported, reveals the extent of misogyny, purity culture and victim blaming prevalent in the very institutions that were created to protect ordinary, vulnerable citizens.
All of these incidents and statistics point to a fundamental contradiction: a system can seem to grant people the formal power to participate in democracy without giving them the practical power to shape the laws that govern their lives. Representation without meaningful access, enforcement without equal protection, and rights without the institutional power to exercise them can reproduce the very hierarchies that law was supposed to dismantle. In that sense, democracy and constitutional law can create the appearance of self-determination while leaving the distribution of power largely unchanged. The representatives may have changed, the institutions may have been renamed, and the mechanisms of control may have become more sophisticated, but the underlying relationship between power and law remains familiar. The people may believe they are governed by laws of their own making, while those laws continue to reflect the interests of those with the greatest power to shape, enforce, and evade them. Perhaps, then, Manto’s question was not merely about whether a new law has been made, but about whether anything fundamental has changed at all. Qanoon wohi hai, purana: the law remains the same, old.
[1] https://www.dawn.com/news/256360/sc-says-no-bar-on-non-muslims-appointment-of-chief-justice
[2] Pakistan bureau of statistics. 7th population and housing consensus 2023.
[3] Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. 6th Population and Housing Consensus 2017.
[4] Saubhadra Chatterji (jun, 23rd 2024), ‘MPs with agricultural background a common theme in 18th Lok Sabha’, Hindustan Times
[5] Vishwa Mohan (May 8th, 2026), Times of India
[6] Haseeb Bhatti (March 30th, 2024), Dawn News
[7] https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/maria-shahbaz
