Justice cannot be a favour

Justice system exposed

The abduction and alleged sexual assault of two foreign women in Lahore was always going to test our institutions, but it has become something more precise: a test of whether proximity to power still determines how the law behaves in this country. The Lahore DIG's admission that the government had to issue explicit orders for a minister-linked suspect to be treated "like any other criminal" should trouble every citizen who has ever waited at a thana counter without a reference to make things move. That instruction should never have needed saying. The fact that it did says everything about how equality before law actually functions here.

A.V. Dicey's classical formulation of the rule of law rested on one non-negotiable premise: that every person, regardless of rank, stands equally subject to the ordinary law administered by ordinary courts. What this case reveals is not a formal absence of that principle in Pakistan's legal code, but its practical suspension as the default condition, one that has to be actively reinstated through political intervention rather than assumed as a baseline. That distinction, between law as written and law as practised, is what scholars of postcolonial states have long identified as this country's structural inheritance. Hamza Alavi's thesis on the overdeveloped postcolonial state argued which bureaucratic and security apparatuses retained from colonial rule kept an autonomy and internal hierarchy that routinely outweighed formal legal equality, particularly where military, political and administrative elites intersected. Ayesha Siddiqa's later work on Pakistan's elite economy extends this, showing how proximity to power confers not just economic privilege but procedural insulation, a shield that must be consciously dismantled by political will rather than dissolved automatically by institutional design.

Hamza Alavi's framework discovers a useful complement in Guillermo O'Donnell's concept of the "brown areas" of the state, regions and situations where the rule of law is present in name but low in intensity, coexisting alongside "blue areas" of high state effectiveness, often within the very same territory and legal code. Pakistan's justice system does not fail uniformly; it fails selectively, intensifying where visibility exists, scrutiny or political direction demands it, and slackening where none of these pressures exist.

None of this suggests that international pressure produced an admirable outcome by accident. It suggests, more usefully, that the ingredients of a functioning blue area, political direction, transparency, coordination, are always available to Pakistan's institutions. Their routine absence for citizens without a minister's family tree or a foreign passport is not a structural inevitability. It is a choice, repeated case by case, that a genuinely equal justice system would no longer need to make.

This case is almost a textbook demonstration: Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz's reported directive demanding "100 percent merit" in punishment was necessary precisely because merit is not the system's default output when a minister's relative is implicated. Political will manufactured a blue area momentarily, within a legal terrain that is ordinarily brown for anyone with the right connections.

Why should this issue be beyond the specifics of one case? Procedural justice theorists such as Tom Tyler have demonstrated that citizen confidence and voluntary compliance with law depend less on the outcome of any single case than on whether citizens perceive the process itself as being applied consistently and neutrally. Every instance where equal treatment must be specially ordered, rather than simply occurring, corrodes precisely this perception, regardless of how the case eventually concludes. Iftikhar Malik's writing on state and society in Pakistan similarly notes that the credibility of Pakistan's legal institutions among ordinary citizens has historically been undermined less by the absence of laws than by the visible unevenness of their application across class and connection.

The second thread in this story, the forcible entry into a magistrate's residence to record statements before the victims' scheduled departure, extends the same argument. The DIG defended the move as necessary to avoid the appearance of stalling, given international scrutiny. This is precisely the dynamic O'Donnell described: state institutions perform with unusual rigour where public visibility and external pressure are concentrated, while routinely lapsing into informality where such pressure is absent. Foreign victims, with embassies and international media attention behind them, generated exactly that pressure. Domestic complainants, overwhelmingly, do not, and Ayesha Jalal's work on the postcolonial state's coercive and discretionary tendencies reminds us that this asymmetry is not incidental but constitutive of how the state has historically allocated its attention and resources.

None of this suggests that international pressure produced an admirable outcome by accident. It suggests, more usefully, that the ingredients of a functioning blue area, political direction, transparency, coordination, are always available to Pakistan's institutions. Their routine absence for citizens without a minister's family tree or a foreign passport is not a structural inevitability. It is a choice, repeated case by case, that a genuinely equal justice system would no longer need to make.