Around the world, democracy is not always overthrown with tanks in the streets or soldiers at the gates of parliament. Increasingly, it is undone more quietly through paperwork, parliamentary votes, and carefully drafted amendments. This slow, legal transformation has a name: authoritarian legalism.
Authoritarian legalism describes a process in which governments use legal and constitutional mechanisms to weaken democratic institutions, limit accountability, and consolidate power, all while appearing to act lawfully. It is not a rejection of the constitution, but a strategic rewriting of it. Instead of dissolving courts, governments redesign them. Instead of eliminating checks and balances, they rearrange them in their favour.
Nowhere is this trend more visible than in South Asia. Over the past decade, several South Asian countries have introduced or attempted significant constitutional and institutional changes affecting the judiciary. While these changes are often justified in the language of reform, efficiency, or stability, taken together they suggest a broader regional shift: the steady erosion of judicial independence through constitutional means.
In Bangladesh, the government passed the 16th Amendment in 2014, giving Parliament the power to remove Supreme Court judges. Critics argued that this placed judges under political threat, making it difficult for them to rule against the government. Although the country’s judiciary eventually managed to strike the amendment down several years later, the episode revealed how easily a legal system could be reshaped to weaken its own independence.
India, long seen as one of the world’s strongest constitutional democracies, faced a similar moment. In 2014, when a constitutional amendment created the National Judicial Appointments Commission, replacing a system that allowed judges themselves to play the primary role in selecting new judges. The new commission included political representatives, raising fears that the government could influence judicial appointments. In a landmark decision, the Indian Supreme Court struck down the amendment, saying it violated the basic structure of the Constitution. Even so, the attempt itself signalled a growing tension between elected power and judicial independence.
In Sri Lanka, constitutional change has come in waves. Amendments in 2010 and in 2020 strengthened executive authority while reducing the power of independent institutions, including the judiciary. These reforms have given the president increased influence over appointments and weakened the systems meant to check that power. Although some earlier reforms tried to swing the balance back toward independence, the overall pattern has been one of constitutional instability and creeping centralization.
In Nepal, the situation is different but no less concerning. Rather than one dramatic amendment, politicization has been built into the judiciary’s structure itself. The body responsible for judicial appointments and discipline includes political actors, leaving the system vulnerable to influence. The result is a judiciary that is constitutionally recognized as independent, but practically entangled with political interests.
The question for South Asia is no longer whether constitutions can be changed. It is whether they can still protect the very values they were written to defend.
Each country’s story is unique. Yet the pattern is unmistakable: the region is witnessing an increased willingness to touch the constitution itself in order to reshape the judiciary.
Nowhere is the trend more pronounced than in Pakistan. In 2024 and 2025, Pakistan passed its 26th and 27th Constitutional Amendments, which together represent one of the most extensive judicial restructurings in the country’s history.
These changes have done more than simply adjust legal procedures. They have altered the very architecture of judicial power. The amendments change the composition of the body responsible for appointing judges, allowing the government and parliament to play a much larger role in deciding who becomes a judge. This marks a significant departure from the idea that the judiciary should be primarily self-regulating in order to preserve independence.
The amendments also introduce a new Federal Constitutional Court, which takes over many of the functions previously performed by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, especially in constitutional and fundamental rights matters. Creating a new institution for such an important role is not just a technical reform. It redefines where ultimate constitutional authority resides.
In addition, the changes increase administrative control over judges, including the possibility of transferring them across provinces or between courts. In legal systems around the world, such powers have often been used to reward compliance or punish disobedience, even when done subtly and legally.
All of this is happening not through martial law or suspension of the constitution, but through the constitution itself. That is precisely what makes authoritarian legalism so difficult to confront. Everything is technically legal. The procedures are followed. The votes are counted. The documents are stamped. And yet the effect is to hollow out the very institutions designed to limit power.
Judiciaries are not perfect. Courts often move slowly, sometimes make poor decisions, and can be disconnected from public life. But in a constitutional system, they play one vital role: they stand between the citizen and unchecked power.
When courts are weakened, politicized, or structurally subordinated to government authority, ordinary people lose one of their last lines of defense. Constitutional rights still appear in books, but there is no independent institution truly capable of enforcing them.
Authoritarian legalism is especially dangerous because it normalizes institutional damage. There are no dramatic moments or sudden collapses. Only a series of amendments, reform bills, new commissions, new courts and new rules, each one justified as progress, each one
reducing independence just a little more. Over time, what was once unthinkable becomes constitutional.
South Asia is not alone in this struggle. Similar processes have taken place in other parts of the world as well. But what makes South Asia distinct is both its size and its symbolism. This is a region that produced some of the world’s most ambitious constitutions and some of the most powerful judicial visions of rights and freedoms.
Today, those constitutional promises are being edited line by line.
If authoritarianism once arrived wearing military boots, it now arrives holding a legal brief and quoting constitutional clauses. That transformation should concern not only lawyers and judges, but every citizen who believes that power should have limits, even when those limits are rewritten.
The question for South Asia is no longer whether constitutions can be changed. It is whether they can still protect the very values they were written to defend.
