Ghost of Lord Macaulay

The Ghost of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay continues to haunt the corridors of power in their pursuit of autocratic rule and this was once evidenced in Islamabad High Court when FIA resorted to a colonial law which continues to be part of our rules even after his death on December 28, 1859. The Chief Justice of Islamabad High Court questioned the state for resorting to such black laws.

How can any government justify that even after our independence on 14 August 1947, we should retain repressive laws enacted to govern an occupied colony by the British Raj? Such black laws have no place in Jinnah’s Pakistan, just like the authoritarian regimes that have ruled and under whose watch we suffered in 1971 and again in the 80s when our sovereignty was compromised to fight a proxy war which has left a legacy of terrorism, extremism and ethnic strife that haunts lives of 220 million citizens with the shattered economy.

Macaulay studied law and served as Secretary of the Board of Control which supervised the administration of India by the East India Company. In 1839 he served as Secretary of War. Macaulay’s children are referred to as people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle and display attitudes influenced by colonialism, with implications of disloyalty to their own country, for which locals were recruited in Indian Bureaucracy to serve the Raj. His final years in India were devoted to the creation of a Penal Code in 1860, to counter the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which laid the basis of the Criminal Procedure Code in 1872 and the Civil Procedure Code 1908. Macaulay advocated the right of Britain to administer its colonies in an autocratic fashion. He was instrumental in creating Indian Bureaucracy to help the Raj prolong their rule in India.

MALIK TARIQ ALI

Lahore

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