The People’s Constitution
The constitution is often celebrated as a charter of liberty, a liberal framework that defines the relationship between the state and its citizens. It is portrayed as a neutral set of rules ensuring accountability, equality, and justice. Yet, beneath this democratic veneer, constitutions frequently serve as instruments that protect the interests of ruling elites. In neoliberal and hybrid political orders, constitutionalism becomes less a pathway to people’s empowerment and more a mechanism for stabilizing elite rule. The constitution, once imagined as a site of democratic struggle, turns into a contract for market governance, a document that guarantees the smooth operation of capital, not the dignity of citizens. In contemporary Pakistan, this contradiction is particularly visible. The 1973 Constitution, once hailed as a consensus document symbolizing national unity, has evolved through amendments that reflect shifting alliances within the ruling class rather than transformations of public will. The proposed Twenty-Seventh Constitutional Amendment of 2025 is yet another moment in this long history, a legal adjustment presented as reform, but in substance a recalibration of power within a hybrid regime that fuses civilian, military, and corporate interests. The amendment reportedly targets key provisions related to fiscal federalism, judicial authority, institutional appointments, and command of the armed forces. Beneath the surface, it signals a move toward re-centralization, shrinking provincial autonomy, and insulating decision-making from democratic oversight.
Understanding this phenomenon requires looking beyond legal texts to the political economy of constitutionalism. From a historical materialist perspective, constitutions are not neutral contracts among equals; they are historical products of class relations and the state’s role in organizing domination. The liberal constitution emerged to stabilize capitalist order to protect property, contract, and hierarchy, even as it proclaimed freedom and equality. Under neoliberalism, this function intensifies. The constitution becomes a managerial tool that institutionalizes market logic as the common sense of governance. Fiscal discipline, privatization, and depoliticization are constitutionalized, while redistribution, public ownership, and participatory governance are marginalized. Citizens are redefined as consumers; public life is recoded as a marketplace.
In Pakistan’s hybrid regime, this neoliberal constitutionalism takes on a distinctive form. The state oscillates between electoral representation and administrative authoritarianism, where unelected institutions like courts, military, financial technocracies — become the primary arbiters of national interest. The judiciary, in particular, occupies a paradoxical role. It is celebrated as the guardian of rights and the protector of democracy, but in practice it often functions as an ideological apparatus that preserves the existing balance of power. Through the rise juristocracy, constitutional courts increasingly claim the authority to define the boundaries of politics itself. This judicialization of politics does not empower the people; it transfers sovereignty from citizens to judges. Under the guise of rights protection and constitutional review, unelected elites, trained in the language of law and steeped in the culture of technocracy become the final interpreters of political life. In Pakistan, landmark judicial interventions have repeatedly redrawn the contours of executive and legislative authority, often aligning with dominant state institutions rather than popular movements. Judicial activism, celebrated in public discourse, frequently masks a deeper depoliticization, the displacement of mass political struggles into courtrooms where only procedural and formal claims can survive. The constitution, instead of being the people’s instrument of emancipation, becomes a text mediated by legal elites who speak in the idiom of order, not liberation.
The proposed 27th Amendment consolidates this trajectory. By seeking to restructure fiscal arrangements under Article 160, it curtails the guarantees of provincial shares established after the 18th Amendment, thereby reversing gains of federal devolution. By proposing to reshape Article 191A and judicial oversight, it further embeds the judiciary’s supervisory power within a centralized framework. Other changes concerning the Election Commission and military command demonstrate the state’s anxiety to maintain control over key sites of authority. These changes, wrapped in the rhetoric of efficiency and stability, reflect not democratic reform but the architecture of a neoliberal state seeking to insulate itself from popular contestation.
Such constitutional engineering is not accidental. It mirrors the transformation of political parties into instruments of neoliberal governance. Once rooted in ideological movements and class solidarities, parties now act as administrative networks for managing the neoliberal order. Their constitutional agenda is guided less by people’s participation than by the imperatives of global finance, donor conditionalities, and corporate partnerships. The 27th Amendment thus represents a convergence of elite interests, the political class seeks legitimacy through reform, the bureaucracy seeks control through law, and global capital demands predictability through constitutional certainty. The result is a legal regime that protects investors more effectively than citizens.
In this post-political moment, where ideological debate is replaced by managerial consensus, the constitution operates as a shield for elite privilege. Rights are commodified, citizenship is instrumentalized, and dissent is pathologized. Subaltern voices including workers, peasants, women, ethnic minorities are silenced through proceduralism. The rule of law, invoked as the highest virtue, becomes the language through which social inequality is justified and sustained. This is the lived reality of neoliberal constitutionalism: a politics without people.
Yet, despite this bleak terrain, the possibility of a people’s constitution endures. It requires reimagining the constitution not as a frozen legal code but as a living document of struggle, a social contract in which sovereignty genuinely flows from below. A people’s constitution would begin by recognizing that rights without resources are illusions, and democracy without participation is empty ritual. It would constitutionalize not only political rights but also social and economic entitlements particularly universal access to health, education, housing, and environmental justice as preconditions for dignity. It would enshrine the principles of sustainable development like equity, participation, and intergenerational responsibility as constitutional obligations of the state, not policy preferences.
Moreover, the people’s constitution must dismantle juristocracy by democratizing law itself. Judicial authority should derive from public accountability, community participation, and transparent appointment mechanisms. Courts must serve as forums for justice, not instruments of elite arbitration. The constitution should reclaim the public sphere from the logic of consumerism by institutionalizing participatory governance by citizens’ assemblies, local councils, and deliberative forums at the grassroots through enabling communities to co-govern rather than be governed.
A reimagined social contract must also redefine the relationship between economy and democracy. The state must be bound by constitutional obligations to protect workers’ rights, regulate markets in the public interest, and pursue ecological sustainability. Fiscal policies should be constitutionally linked to redistributive goals, ensuring that development is measured by human well-being, not GDP growth. Political parties must be restructured to embody democratic education, inclusivity, and social accountability rather than elite brokerage. The constitution, then, should not silence conflict but channel it productively by acknowledging that democracy is not consensus but contestation. People’s participation is not a threat to order but the essence of freedom. As long as the constitution remains the monopoly of jurists and technocrats, democracy will remain suspended between the rhetoric of inclusion and the reality of exclusion. But when the constitution becomes a collective act of imagination authored by those who live under its promises, it transforms from an instrument of domination into a charter of emancipation. In the twenty-first century, the challenge is not to amend the constitution to stabilize power but to rewrite it to humanize governance. The people’s constitution must affirm life against market logic, solidarity against competition, and participation against alienation. It must recover the moral vocabulary of dignity, justice, mutual care and values that the neoliberal order has systematically eroded. Only then can the constitution fulfill its original, radical promise, not as a set of rules for the powerful, but as a living covenant of the powerless to make freedom real.
