Zia-ul-Haq, Muhammad Khan Junejo, and the Politics of the Exception in Pakistan, 1977 to 1988

Abstract

This article examines the constitutional and institutional architecture through which General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's martial law regime reorganized, rather than simply suspended, democratic form in Pakistan between 1977 and 1988. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's theorization of the sovereign exception and Guillermo O'Donnell's concept of delegative and tutelary democracy, the article argues that the 1985 restoration of civilian government under Prime Minister Muhammad Khan Junejo did not amount to a return to constitutional normalcy. It amounted instead to the institutionalization of the exception itself, in which a supplemented civilian order operated permanently within, and at the pleasure of, an unaccountable executive sovereign. The article traces this dynamic across four moments. It begins with Operation Fair Play and the indefinite deferral of the promised ninety-day transition. It moves through the eight years of martial law administration and the eventual 1985 non-party elections. It follows the drafting of the Eighth Constitutional Amendment and the powers it placed in presidential hands. The final section addresses the dismissal of the Junejo government on 29 May 1988 and the contested succession that followed Zia's death in August of that year. Each of these moments reproduces the same underlying grammar, in which sovereign decision presents itself as constitutional procedure. The analysis concludes that Zia's Pakistan offers one of the clearest empirical cases available of what O'Donnell called tutelary democracy, a regime in which elections, cabinets and legislatures function, but only as supplements to an extra constitutional locus of final authority rather than as constraints upon it.

Keywords: Pakistan, Martial Law, Zia-Ul-Haq, Muhammad Khan Junejo, Carl Schmitt, Sovereign Exception, Delegative Democracy, Eighth Amendment, Article 58(2)(B), Civil Military Relations