If you don't shackle the Leviathan, it eats you up

Why the 26th amendment is a thirty-year setback

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation he has been chasing for months. Pakistanis are demoralised, businesses keep coming back to the phrase “rule of law”, and he wants someone who has actually studied the country’s justice system to explain where it stands and where it is going. Sultan Mehmood joins from Moscow, and within the first answer he sets the floor for everything that follows.

The 26th amendment, in his reading, has not damaged a working system. It has reversed a series of institutional gains that took Pakistan almost three decades to assemble. The reference point he uses is not 2010 or 2007 — it is 1996. That year, in the Al-Jihad Trust case, Pakistan’s Supreme Court followed an earlier Indian decision and reinterpreted “advice” of the chief justice on judicial appointments as binding on the executive. It was, Sultan argues, the start of a real architecture of judicial independence in Pakistan. The 18th and 19th amendments later institutionalised a judicial commission in which senior judges, not the executive, picked judges.

The 26th amendment, he says, has unwound all of that. The executive now appoints. It controls bench composition — which judge hears which case. It can review the chief justice’s performance. “They have kind of created a judiciary in which there is a race,” he says, “of who will become the chief justice that is best for the government.” Sultan is precise about the empirical claim underneath this: his own paper on the 2010 reform shows that pro-government rulings fell and merit-based decisions rose in the high courts over the following decade. The 26th amendment, in his words, has “reversed what was going right with the judiciary instead of fixing what was wrong.”

Shackling the Leviathan

The most useful framework Sultan offers in the conversation is borrowed from the broader institutional-economics literature, and he names it directly. Courts exist for two reasons. The first is the one economists usually emphasise: they enforce contracts, which is what makes long-term investment possible. He nods to Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2024 Nobel here. The second is the one he says Pakistan refuses to internalise — shackling.

Every country has a Leviathan. In the United States it is the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical lobby. In Pakistan it is the military establishment. “If you do not shackle the Leviathan,” Sultan says, “it is going to get stronger and stronger and eat you up more and more.” He runs the example forward through Pakistani political history. In 2008 the PPP comes in after Benazir’s assassination and Zardari insists he is in charge — but the Leviathan is not shackled, only nudged. In 2013 PMLN forms government and is visibly behind the establishment. In 2018 PTI arrives on the explicit logic of a “hybrid” arrangement, “one page”, and again the Leviathan is not shackled. By 2024, on Sultan’s reading, the Leviathan is simply running things directly.

The conclusion he draws from this sequence is not partisan. It is structural. The courts have a duty to shackle whoever is strongest in the system, not to demur on jurisdictional grounds. That is, in his view, the only way constitutional courts protect themselves over time.

Suo motu, Iftikhar Chaudhry, and a more honest history

Muzamil presses Sultan to look further back than 1996 — what was the justice system before the door opened? Sultan answers with the origin story of suo motu jurisdiction. In 1989 a Christian bonded labourer named Darshan Masih wrote a letter to the chief justice saying he was being repeatedly returned to forced labour by the police. The chief justice initiated a case on his own motion. The Darshan Masih judgment in 1990 became the first formal use of suo motu in Pakistan, and Sultan argues it is one of the most important things that has happened in the country’s legal history — not because of the doctrine itself but because of what it signals about what courts are for.

From there he pushes back hard on what he calls a “lazy argument” — the one that says Pakistan’s judiciary has always been a handmaiden of the establishment. He cites his own empirical work showing rulings against the government and against military-linked corporations rising after the 2010 reform. He cites the Raymond Davis episode as recounted in Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife — a Lahore judge sitting in court with the ISI chief present, refusing to do what he was told, and forcing an out-of-court settlement. And he is careful, even-handed about Iftikhar Chaudhry himself. The man made political mistakes, Sultan grants, and his record is uneven. But on the question of judicial independence, the historians of the future will look at one moment: four generals in front of him asking for his resignation, and his answer being no. “That kind of — that’s the hard thing to do,” Sultan says, “and that’s what historians are going to look at.”

What the lawyers’ movement actually was

Muzamil names the version of the 2007 lawyers’ movement that has circulated heavily in recent years — that it was, in the end, an ISI operation. Sultan, who has spent the last eight years researching the movement village by village, calls this propaganda and explains how it works.

The propaganda is convenient because parts of it are technically true. General Kayani did want Chaudhry as chief justice. Judges have always lobbied each other to become the chief, the same way ISI chiefs lobby to become COAS. But that is a feature of every Pakistani institution, not a unique fingerprint of the movement. The structural fact about the movement that Sultan keeps returning to is the network: roughly 200,000 lawyers spread across every city and tehsil in Pakistan, organised through bar associations, providing safety in numbers. That network is what made the difference. When the Supreme Court Bar called a strike, the district and tehsil bars followed within hours. Courts came to a halt. The state tried everything — lawyers were burned in Sahiwal, lawyers were shot at on 12 May — and the network kept coming back.

Sultan also corrects the date Muzamil tries to attach to the movement. The picture that sparked it, he says, was not the Musharraf–Chaudhry meeting itself but the photograph of a police constable physically shoving the chief justice into a car. That was the image. The affidavit Chaudhry filed afterwards — that four generals had threatened him and his family if he did not resign — was the text. The movement that grew around them is, in Sultan’s reading, one of the most fascinating civil-society uprisings in world history. Without it, neither Benazir nor Nawaz would have come back from political cold storage.

Why this time looks different

The harder question, and the one Muzamil keeps coming back to, is why the response to the 26th amendment has not looked anything like 2007. Sultan’s answer is direct: the establishment has learned from the last cycle, and the lawyers have not.

The Supreme Court Bar has been deliberately neutralised. Housing schemes, the dangling promise of judgeships, and a thousand smaller offers have eroded the network that made the 2007 movement possible. Sultan is careful to say it is not universal — he names the current Supreme Court Bar secretary Salman Mansoor as someone who has refused everything offered to him and filed a petition against the 26th amendment. But the focal point is missing. In 2007 the focal point was Iftikhar Chaudhry — a man willing to be physically dragged out of his car. In 2025 there is no equivalent figure inside the court system. The current chief justice, he says, has agreed to be a figurehead.

The civil-society side is the second half of the answer, and Sultan does not let political parties off the hook. When PTI spent years calling civil society “NGO babies” and dismissively painting it as foreign-funded, it broke the bond that had made 2007 work. Now those same NGOs are watching the Leviathan eat the people who insulted them and feeling, in his phrase, “told you so.” Sultan is blunt about what is required to fix that: someone has to be the bigger person, reach out, apologise, and remind them of their principles. That work has not been done.

Muzamil pushes harder. He cites the Twitter discourse he has been watching that morning, the visible alignment of parts of the civil society leadership with the current government, the perks and privileges they enjoy in this dispensation. Sultan grants it without flinching. “Humans are very petty unfortunately and they enjoy ‘I told you so’ way too much.” But, he says, he has spoken to many of them recently. Ask anyone to defend the 26th amendment on its merits and they cannot. The mental gymnastics required is too much.

Repression as weakness

One of the sharpest sections of the conversation comes when Muzamil asks Sultan to extrapolate forward. The framing on the street is that the state is now infinitely powerful, that any focal point will be immediately discredited as political, that anyone who emerges will be tied to PTI and dismissed. Sultan rejects the premise.

“Their power is not infinite,” he says of the people running Pakistan. “A lot of people think a dictator can do everything. That’s not true.” He gives Musharraf as the example: Musharraf wanted to repeal the blasphemy law and build Kalabagh Dam, and his own inner circle told him he could not — that if he tried, he would not be there afterwards. Every system, even an authoritarian one, has constraints.

The corollary is the line Muzamil returns to several times: “The more repression you do, that’s actually a sign of weakness.” Visible force is not evidence of stability. It is evidence that a regime has run out of consent and has to manufacture compliance. That is, in Sultan’s view, where Pakistan is now.

Revolutions are an elite phenomenon

Sultan’s most provocative claim in the conversation — and the one he flags will upset his Marxist friends — is that revolutions are not made by the masses. They are engineered by an educated elite around a focal point, with latent grievances doing the rest of the work. The Bolshevik revolution was Lenin and an educated reading class inflamed by Russian literature. The French revolution was the encyclopaedists. Peasants and farmers, he says flatly, are too ground down to organise. “You can’t expect them to be.”

The arithmetic he offers is the part Muzamil pulls on. For a country of 250 million people, two percent is more than enough. “All you need is a 2% of the population.” The focal point is what converts the latent grievance into a movement. He does not predict whether Pakistan’s focal point will be peaceful or violent — that, he says, depends on whether the mainstream political parties and civil society get their act together in time. If they do not, the focal point will come from somewhere uglier. He names the TLP and “these types” as the alternative.

The periphery is moving toward the centre

Muzamil shifts to KP and Balochistan, and to the TikTok videos he keeps seeing — comment sections with thirty and forty thousand entries swearing blood-for-blood after the November 26 protests. Sultan’s response goes back to the British. Pakistan has always been more repressive in its peripheries than in central Punjab because central Punjab is the recruitment base. Martial-race theory, he says, was an invented British framework, and Pakistan never quite let go of it.

The new danger is structural. The peripheries have always had grievances. What is changing is that the fight is now moving toward the centre, and the state is responding by repressing the centre too. He brings in the French revolution again to make the point. The Bastille did not fall because the protesters were stronger than the guards. It fell because the guards turned the keys over. That is the risk Pakistan is running by alienating the same population it recruits from. “Eventually if you make everything a periphery — KP is periphery, Balochistan is periphery, Sindh is periphery, now Punjab is periphery — this is not going to work, because you have to recruit people from somewhere.”

Reconfigure, do not rebuild

Muzamil closes by putting Ahmad Zubair’s “Third Republic” thesis to Sultan. The argument that Pakistan in 1947 was one state, that 1971 produced a second state under a new social contract, and that the structural exhaustion visible now is the end of that second cycle. Sultan respectfully disagrees.

He grants Pakistan has been reimagined many times — the one-unit experiment failed, the 1971 break was its own reimagining, and the Bhola cyclone of 1970 with Yahya’s infamous “savings have been made” line was the focal point that converted Bengali grievance into mukti bahini. But Pakistan’s foundational design, in his view, was always a semi-democracy, and the last thirty years have been an attempt to push it toward autocracy that the population will not accept. Every military dictator has had his undoing.

The reconfiguration he sees coming is not a new constitution and not a new state. It is the military elite — either by force or by recognising the social contract on offer is not the one the public will accept — coming back to the table and a new arrangement being negotiated. He is hopeful about the lower judiciary, which he says is more independent and more thoughtful than the public assumes. He trains lower-court judges as part of his research and finds them resilient in ways the system does not advertise. Pakistan, he argues, looks structurally healthier than Bangladesh did at the same point on its trajectory.

The corrective he keeps returning to is narrower than rebuilding the state. Reverse the 26th amendment. Restore the judicial commission. Let the lawyers and the judges, in Chaudhry’s old metaphor, function as the two wheels of the same chariot. Stop the executive from owning judicial appointments and bench composition. “You don’t have to burn it down and build a new system altogether.”

Muzamil ends the episode honest about not sharing all of Sultan’s optimism. He suspects Pakistan is now in the age of authoritarianism, and that even a future change of government will not automatically reverse the 26th amendment. Sultan’s closing line, which Muzamil agrees is the point most people are missing, is the operative one. The lawyers and the civil society have to make the push themselves. An independent judiciary is what protects against future Leviathans — and there will be future Leviathans.