Constitution-Making in Pakistan during the 1950s: Causes of Delay

15 min readMar 2, 2022

Abstract

Constitution-making in Pakistan has, unfortunately, a chequered and deeply instructive history. After gaining independence in August 1947, Pakistan adopted the Government of India Act 1935 — with slight modifications — as an interim constitutional instrument and set earnestly to work on framing a permanent, consensus-based document that would define the new state’s identity and structure. The task proved far more formidable than anticipated.

Due to a peculiar constellation of post-partition circumstances, the enormous complexity of the issues requiring resolution, and the chronic incompetency and self-interestedness of the political elite, it took more than seven years — from 1947 to 1956 — to accomplish what a more cohesive political class might have achieved in one or two.

This essay examines the causes of that extraordinary delay in detail, arguing that the protracted constitution-making process was not merely a technical or procedural failure but a symptom of deeper pathologies in Pakistani politics that would continue to haunt the country long after the 1956 Constitution was finally adopted — and swiftly abrogated.

Introduction

After its independence from Britain on 14 August 1947, Pakistan adopted the Government of India Act 1935, with modifications, as its interim constitutional framework. Known formally as the Pakistan (Provisional Constitutional) Order 1947, this instrument established the federation of Pakistan comprising East Bengal, West Punjab, Sindh, the North-West Frontier Province, Baluchistan, and any areas that might subsequently accede to Pakistan. The Interim Constitution provided for a strong central government, a Governor-General endowed with sweeping powers, and strictly limited popular representation. It was, in other words, a colonial document pressed into service for a post-colonial state — an arrangement all parties regarded as strictly temporary.

At the same time, the National Assembly, which also served as the Constituent Assembly, commenced the work of framing a permanent constitution. Its subcommittee, the Basic Principles Committee (BPC), was entrusted with producing the foundational guidelines for the exercise. The BPC submitted the Objectives Resolution — a document reflecting the strong influence of religious groups and articulating Pakistan’s aspirations as an Islamic democratic state — which was approved by the Constituent Assembly on 12 March 1949. What followed, however, was seven years of political turbulence, institutional dysfunction, and abortive draftsmanship before a permanent constitution was finally adopted.

The journey to the 1956 Constitution was marked by three successive draft proposals, each failing for broadly similar reasons. The BPC’s first report, submitted by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan on 28 September 1950, was rejected principally because it allocated equal representation to both wings despite East Pakistan’s larger population, and proposed Urdu as the sole state language — a provision that was anathema to the Bengali-speaking majority of the eastern wing.

Following Liaquat’s assassination on 16 October 1951, a second draft was presented on 22 December 1952 by Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin. It proposed bicameral legislation with equal representation in both houses but again fell foul of the representation and language controversies. The third draft, known as the Bogra Formula, was presented by Prime Minister Muhammad Ali Bogra on 5 October 1953.

It offered a genuine compromise: a lower house of 300 seats allocated on a population basis (East Bengal receiving 165 seats), and an upper house of 52 seats with equal provincial representation. The Bogra Formula was the most promising attempt yet — but political developments at the provincial level and within the Constituent Assembly rapidly overtook it.

Two events in 1954 transformed the constitutional landscape.

· First, the Muslim League suffered a catastrophic defeat in the East Pakistan provincial elections of March 1954, routed by the United Front coalition led by the Awami League and the Krishak Sramik Party. The new government was almost immediately dismissed by the centre — a decision that inflamed Bengali opinion and deepened distrust of the western establishment.

· Second, in September 1954, the National Assembly passed legislation requiring the Governor-General to act on the advice of the Prime Minister and mandating that the Prime Minister command an Assembly majority. Governor-General Ghulam Muhammad, perceiving the erosion of his personal authority, dissolved the Assembly altogether on 24 October 1954. The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Muhammad Munir, validated the dissolution under the doctrine of necessity — a legal precedent whose long-term consequences for Pakistani constitutionalism would prove disastrous.

Following the dissolution, the western provinces were merged into the notorious One Unit scheme and fresh elections were held on 21 June 1955. The newly elected Prime Minister, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, reconstituted the constitution-making effort with fresh determination, constituted a special committee, and finally produced the draft that became the 1956 Constitution. Despite a walkout by Maulana Bhashani’s Awami League faction — protesting inadequate provincial autonomy for East Pakistan — the Constitution was adopted on 23 March 1956. It was an achievement of genuine significance, and one that had been unconscionably delayed. This essay analyses the structural, political, and circumstantial reasons for that delay.

Reasons for Delay in Constitution-Making

A. The Peculiar Circumstances of Partition

The foundational difficulty was that Pakistan came into existence in circumstances that were almost uniquely inhospitable to deliberate constitution-making. The partition of British India was not an orderly constitutional transfer of power but a cataclysm — accompanied by communal violence on a scale that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.

The leadership of the Muslim League had, in the years before independence, focused its energies on the political campaign for a separate homeland rather than on planning the institutional architecture of the state they hoped to create. When independence came, with brutal suddenness, in August 1947, the new government found itself simultaneously managing a refugee crisis of staggering proportions, improvising an administrative apparatus out of whatever personnel and resources partition had left, negotiating the accession of princely states, managing a military standoff with India over Kashmir, and attempting to establish the elementary machinery of governance. In this context, the careful, deliberative work of constitution-making was inevitably relegated to secondary urgency.

The physical inheritance of partition compounded the problem. Pakistan received a disproportionately small share of British India’s administrative records, financial reserves, and trained civil servants. The mass exodus of Hindu and Sikh administrators, professionals, and business people from what became Pakistani territory stripped the new state of much of the educated talent it desperately needed. The government was preoccupied, in its earliest years, with questions of basic survival — financial solvency, territorial integrity, and the absorption of refugees — rather than constitutional philosophy.

B. The Geographical and Demographic Paradox

Pakistan’s peculiar geography posed challenges that had no precedent in modern constitution-making. The country consisted of two wings separated by approximately 1,100 miles of Indian territory — a configuration that was not merely administratively inconvenient but politically explosive. East Pakistan contained slightly more than half of Pakistan’s total population and had higher literacy rates than most of the western provinces. Yet it was geographically, economically, and politically peripheral to the western establishment concentrated in Karachi and, later, Lahore. The civil service, the officer corps of the armed forces, and the senior echelons of the ruling Muslim League were overwhelmingly dominated by West Pakistanis — and, within the west, disproportionately by Punjabis and Muhajirs (migrants from India).

This demographic and representational asymmetry made virtually every constitutional question contentious. How seats were to be allocated between the wings, which language or languages would enjoy official status, what degree of provincial autonomy would be guaranteed, how economic revenues would be distributed — all of these questions had a different answer depending on whether one was negotiating from an East Pakistani or West Pakistani standpoint. The western political establishment had every incentive to delay a constitutional settlement that would, on any democratic basis, deliver a Bengali-dominated legislature. The eastern leadership had every reason to insist on urgency but lacked the institutional leverage to compel it.

C. The Complexity and Contentiousness of the Core Issues

Beyond the structural tensions between the two wings, the substantive issues requiring constitutional resolution were themselves of formidable complexity. On the form of state, the West Pakistani political elite generally favoured a strong centre with limited provincial autonomy — in part from genuine conviction about the requirements of national security, and in part because a strong centre preserved their dominance. East Pakistani politicians consistently demanded a federal structure with maximum provincial autonomy and a bicameral legislature in which the provinces could defend their interests.

The question of the form of government was equally divisive. West Pakistani politicians — and, increasingly, the civil-military bureaucracy — favoured a presidential or quasi-presidential system that would concentrate executive authority in offices they could more readily control. East Pakistani leaders, conscious of their numerical majority, preferred a parliamentary system in which legislative arithmetic would ultimately determine who governed. These preferences were not merely tactical; they reflected genuinely different visions of what kind of state Pakistan should be.

The representation formula was perhaps the single most intractable issue. Any allocation of legislative seats on a straightforward population basis would hand East Pakistan a permanent parliamentary majority. This was democratically unimpeachable but politically unacceptable to the West Pakistani establishment. The Parity Principle — equal representation for both wings regardless of population — was the eventual compromise, but it required the artificial merger of all West Pakistani provinces into One Unit, a decision that stored up its own reserves of provincial resentment.

The role of Islam in the constitutional framework generated its own category of difficulty. Most political actors agreed that Pakistan’s constitution should reflect its Islamic character, but the meaning of that commitment was deeply contested. For the ulema and Islamist political parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic state required substantive implementation of Sharia and recognition of the ulema’s authority in determining the conformity of legislation with Islamic law. For the modernist politicians and the bureaucratic elite — many of them educated in a Western tradition — Islam was an identity and a moral framework, not a legal system to be administered by clerics. These irreconcilable positions consumed enormous parliamentary time and energy without resolution, until a formula was eventually found that papered over the disagreement rather than resolving it.

The language question was no less volatile. The decision to make Urdu the sole national language — imposed by the League leadership without consultation — had triggered the Language Movement in East Pakistan, culminating in the shootings of 21 February 1952 in which students were killed by police during a protest march in Dhaka. The martyrs of what became Language Martyrs’ Day transformed the linguistic question from a cultural preference into a matter of political identity and historical grievance. Any constitutional settlement that did not recognise Bengali as a national language was unacceptable to East Pakistani opinion; any settlement that did was resisted by sections of the western establishment who regarded it as a concession to separatism.

D. The Condition of Statecraft and Administrative Capacity

Unlike India, which inherited a fully functioning and experienced administrative apparatus, Pakistan faced the daunting challenge of constructing its governance structures largely from nothing. The Indian Civil Service officers who opted for Pakistan were a small fraction of the available pool, and their technical capacity, however impressive, could not substitute for the institutional depth that India retained. Pakistan lacked trained lawyers, administrators, and constitutional experts in sufficient numbers to sustain the parallel enterprises of running a state and drafting its fundamental law. The resources of government were chronically overstretched.

The refugee crisis of 1947–48 imposed particular strains. Millions of Muslim migrants from India had to be housed, fed, documented, and integrated into the new state’s economic and social fabric. The state’s administrative bandwidth was consumed by these immediate humanitarian and logistical demands, leaving little capacity for the patient, consultative work that sound constitution-making requires. Provinces that were themselves barely functioning — especially Sindh and the NWFP — could not spare senior administrators or politicians for extended periods of constitution-drafting in Karachi.

E. The Ineffectiveness of the Constituent Assembly

The Constituent Assembly was, on paper, the supreme constitution-making body of the new state. In practice, it was a largely ineffective institution hampered by its own procedural shortcomings, its members’ divided loyalties, and the political instability that repeatedly disrupted its work. In its first seven years, the Assembly held only 116 meetings — a figure that compares poorly with the pace of comparable constitution-making exercises elsewhere. Attendance fluctuated between 37 and 56 members out of a total of 76, suggesting that many representatives regarded their constitutional duties as secondary to their other political and governmental responsibilities.

The Assembly’s dual mandate was a structural flaw that was never satisfactorily resolved. Its members were simultaneously legislators responsible for the day-to-day business of governing the country and constitution-makers responsible for designing the framework within which that government would operate. These roles imposed conflicting demands on the members’ time, attention, and political energy. The constitution-making function consistently lost out to the more immediate pressures of legislative and governmental business.

The death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah in September 1948 removed the one figure who possessed the moral authority to hold the Assembly together and impose discipline on its fractious membership. Jinnah’s successor as Governor-General, Khawaja Nazimuddin, lacked his predecessor’s commanding presence, and the Assembly rapidly became a theatre of regional and factional competition rather than a forum for national consensus-building. The subcommittees produced reports that were discussed, amended, shelved, and revived in cycles that reflected political convenience rather than constitutional urgency.

F. The Weakness of Pakistan’s Political Culture

At a deeper level, the delays in constitution-making reflected the immaturity and fragility of Pakistan’s democratic political culture. The Muslim League — the party that had won independence — had been, throughout its existence, a movement of elite Muslim professionals and landlords rather than a mass democratic organisation. It had never needed to develop the internal democratic procedures, the ideological coherence, or the grassroots organisational capacity that might have equipped it for the challenges of post-independence governance.

After the deaths of Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan, the League’s leadership passed to men of considerably smaller stature who were unable to rise above their provincial and factional identities. The basic democratic virtues — the willingness to lose elections gracefully, to accommodate opponents’ legitimate interests, to build coalitions across regional divides — were largely absent from the political culture of the early 1950s. Instead, Pakistani politics degenerated into a scramble for ministerial office, conducted through the manipulation of the Governor-General’s patronage rather than through democratic competition. In this environment, the systematic, sustained effort required to produce a constitutional consensus was perpetually crowded out by shorter-term tactical calculations.

The broader citizenry, moreover, had little institutional means of holding its representatives accountable. No general elections were held in the decade after independence. The Constituent Assembly had not been elected to make a constitution; it had been transformed into one by administrative fiat. Its members, therefore, had no popular mandate in the ordinary democratic sense, and no electoral incentive to deliver a constitutional settlement that would have required them to hold elections — and risk their seats.

G. The Failure of the Muslim League as a National Party

The political party most responsible for Pakistan’s existence — and therefore most obligated to provide the leadership necessary for its constitutional consolidation — was the Muslim League. Its failure to meet that obligation was spectacular and consequential. In the nine years following independence, the League held no annual convention, the principal mechanism through which a party renews its democratic mandate and clarifies its programmatic direction. Factionalism, personal rivalries, and the pervasive perception of corruption steadily eroded its credibility and membership. The League’s catastrophic defeat in the East Pakistan provincial elections of March 1954 — in which it won a mere nine seats out of 309 — was not an aberration but the culmination of years of organisational neglect and political disconnection from ordinary Bengalis.

Without a functioning national party to aggregate and mediate the diverse interests of a geographically and culturally bifurcated country, the constitutional process had no reliable political vehicle. Each subsequent government was a coalition of convenience or a personal clique around the Prime Minister of the moment, without the organisational depth or popular legitimacy to make the painful compromises that a durable constitution required. The Muslim League’s decay left a vacuum at the centre of Pakistani politics that the civil-military establishment was only too willing to fill.

H. The Ascendancy of Non-Political Forces

Perhaps the most structurally significant cause of delay — and of the ultimate failure of democratic constitutionalism in this period — was the progressive encroachment of non-political forces on the constitution-making process. The civil bureaucracy, inheriting the colonial tradition of administrative supremacy, regarded elected politicians with barely concealed contempt and worked systematically to preserve its own autonomy and influence. Senior civil servants such as Ghulam Muhammad and Iskander Mirza — both of whom moved from the bureaucracy into the highest political offices — exemplified this tendency. As Governor-General, Ghulam Muhammad dismissed two prime ministers and ultimately dissolved the Constituent Assembly itself, substituting his personal authority for the constitutional process.

The military, meanwhile, was developing its own political consciousness and institutional ambitions. Pakistan’s security environment — the unresolved Kashmir dispute, the armed conflict with India in 1947–48, and the strategic calculations of the Cold War — provided the armed forces with a rationale for claiming a decisive voice in national policy that went far beyond strictly military matters. The alliance with the United States, formalised through the 1954 Mutual Defence Assistance Agreement and Pakistan’s membership of SEATO and later CENTO, brought substantial military aid that enhanced the army’s resources and prestige relative to civilian institutions. General Ayub Khan, appointed Commander-in-Chief in 1951, was already preparing the ideological case for military governance — arguing that Pakistan’s politicians were too corrupt and incompetent to be trusted with the country’s survival.

The judiciary, for its part, provided intellectual cover for executive overreach. The Federal Court’s validation of the 1954 dissolution of the Constituent Assembly under the doctrine of necessity — a doctrine with no grounding in Pakistani constitutional law and borrowed at questionable remove from Kelsenian legal philosophy — gave constitutional respectability to what was, in substance, a coup. By ruling that successful illegality acquires its own legitimacy, the court undermined the very constitutional order it was charged with protecting and set a precedent that would be invoked repeatedly in the decades to come.

Conclusion

The extraordinary delay in Pakistan’s constitution-making during the 1950s was not the product of any single cause but of a complex and mutually reinforcing set of structural, political, and circumstantial factors. The trauma of partition and the sheer demands of state-building in impossible circumstances imposed genuine constraints on what any government could have achieved. But beyond these objective difficulties, the constitution-making process was further retarded by the irreconcilable tensions between East and West Pakistan over representation, language, and autonomy; by the incompetence and self-interestedness of a political class that consistently subordinated national constitutional imperatives to factional calculation; by the organisational collapse of the Muslim League as a national governing party; by the aggressive intervention of non-elected institutions — the Governor-General’s office, the bureaucracy, and ultimately the military — in processes that should have been the exclusive province of elected representatives; and by a judicial establishment that legitimised executive overreach when it should have contained it.

The 1956 Constitution that eventually emerged from this protracted and painful process was, as Part Two of this study examines, a compromise document that bore the marks of all these contradictions. It satisfied no constituency entirely, resolved no fundamental tension permanently, and survived less than three years before being abrogated. But it represented something of genuine importance nonetheless: a written agreement, endorsed by the majority of elected representatives who had participated in the freedom struggle, affirming their collective resolve to live together as a single constitutional community. When Iskander Mirza dissolved the Constitution on 7 October 1958 and General Ayub Khan sent him into exile three weeks later, they did not merely abrogate a legal document. They severed the slender thread of constitutional continuity that connected Pakistan’s political system to the democratic aspirations that had animated the independence movement — and they cut, as the concluding reflection of this study observes, the very roots of the country as a united nation-state.

Pakistan:1947-2026: A Political History (Pakistan History Book 1)

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