Manish Tewari | To Junta From Democracy? How Army Charted Pakistan's Fall

Pakistan’s recent passage of the 27th Constitutional Amendment in November 2025 marks another milestone in Pakistan’s systematic descent into institutionalised military authoritarianism. This alteration to the Constitution represents a continuation of or, more importantly, an additional chapter in an already over seventy-year saga of military rule, which has completely eroded Pakistan’s democratic systems, social fabric and economic potential. To grasp the entirety of the chicanery that has come to define Pakistan today, one must reflect on the long history of military coups that have historically stifled democratic impulses since independence.

Constitutionalising military supremacy: The 27th Amendment, passed on November 11, 2025, creates a new military command and judicial structure in Pakistan. It creates a constitutionally recognised position of Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), merging it with the Chief of Army Staff and abolishing the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. This places the current Army Chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, as the supreme command for each military service with ostensibly a fixed tenure for five years.

The CDF gains exclusive power to appoint military and intelligence heads, including the ISI chief. The CDF is granted immunity from being challenged legally and politically, making the appointment constitutionally untouchable. Five-star ranks in the military are granted lifetime immunity from criminal proceedings, providing institutional amnesty for past and future crimes and abuses. Additionally, the amendment restructures the nuclear command in Pakistan and creates a Commander of the National Strategic Command (NSC), under the authority of the CDF in order to further institutionalise military control over nuclear weapons and other assets.

Dismantling judicial independence: The 27th Amendment can be regarded as a systematic dismantling of judicial independence, the last institutional check on military power. It creates a federal Constitutional Court (FCC) to handle constitutional matters, reducing the Supreme Court to civil and criminal appeals. It also shifts judicial appointments and transfers from the judiciary to the Prime Minister, which can easily nominate politically compliant appointees and remove independent appointees.

In combination with the 26th Amendment (October 2024), which gave parliament control over Chief Justice appointments, the judiciary has been ultimately subordinated to executive authority. Legal experts and constitutional scholars contend that this is the end of judicial independence in Pakistan; with no independent judicial oversight now left to enforce constitutional limits, no institutional mechanism to proscribe and ring fence the limits of military power.

From Ayub to Musharraf: The transformation of Pakistan into a military state began in 1958 when Gen. Muhammad Ayub Khan ousted President Iskander Mirza in a coup. The Supreme Court’s endorsement of his regime under the “Doctrine of Necessity” tainted the judiciary and normalised unconstitutional seizures of power. Under Ayub’s autocracy, Pakistan’s young democratic institutions were dismantled, and the military established itself as the ultimate repository of political legitimacy.

Ayub’s successor, Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan (1969-1971), presided over the country’s worst tragedy — the genocide of East Pakistan. He refused to accept Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League’s electoral victory. Through their violence against their citizens, the military showed it was willing to destroy the country to maintain its supremacy. Pakistan emerged from that nightmare decimated, having lost both its population and territory with the creation of Bangladesh.

The next military leader to take control was Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (1977-1988) who took the autocracy a step further through a new tool — Islamisation. His Hudood and Zina ordinances criminalised the victims of sexual assault and made gender injustice part of state policy. Zia enlarged state-sponsored madrasas that led to a concurrent rise in extremism and sectarian violence in the 1980’s. Extremists such as the Taliban found ideological homes in these seminaries. He also rewrote textbooks to glorify jihad while vilifying Hindus and the West.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf's coup in 1999 reflected the duplicity of the military. Without informing the civilian government, he secretly commanded Pakistani forces to infiltrate Kargil in 1999, resulting in disastrous defeat. As the Chief of Army Staff at the time, he seized control, declared a state of emergency and suspended the Constitution, eventually becoming the chief executive of the country.

These dictators militarised Pakistan's polity, moral fabric and collective consciousness, essentially eradicating democracy and establishing authoritarianism as the nation’s default option. The military built an enormous economic empire, controlling roughly 12 per cent of the nation's land, operating 50+ commercial enterprises worth billions of rupees. These tax-free enterprises supplant the established business community with privileged contracts. More than 40 per cent of Pakistanis live below the country’s poverty line while the generals live in regal splendour in palatial mansions in Pakistan and abroad.

The military has utilised terrorist organisations — Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Taliban, Haqqani Network — as foreign policy tools while accepting billions of US dollars for counterterrorism.

Erosion of Pakistan’s social fabric: For decades, the military has systematically undermined the social cohesion of Pakistan transforming a once permissive society into one divided by sectarianism and fear. Zia’s Islamisation aimed to suppress secular forces and instill intolerance toward minorities and dissenters. This state-sponsored sectarianism dismantled Pakistan’s pluralism by replacing Sufi tolerance with rigid Baharist, Deobandi and Wahhabi traditions that bred systemic discrimination and violence.

The military’s organised repression of civil society through disappearances, torture, censorship and criminalising dissent has normalised a climate of terror and fear that destroys civic engagement. Journalists are intimidated, activists go missing and everyday citizens practise self-censorship to avoid state persecution. The preponderance of institutional terror has annihilated the democratic culture that is necessary to facilitate healthy cohesion in society, and in its place has created a culture of mutual mistrust and paranoia.

Ethnic divisions have been weaponised. Punjab’s military and bureaucratic dominance has inflamed resentments among Baloch, Sindhi and Pashtun communities, turning diversity from a strength into a perceived liability. Pakistan’s cohesion now relies entirely on externalised threats, primarily India, instead of shared internal values and participatory governance. This paradigm produces a “security state” in which the singular unifying factor is the military’s dominance, making any genuine integration nationally impossible.

Dictatorship constitutionalised: The military of Pakistan has destroyed the foundations of whatever democratic aspirations the constitutionalist Muhammad Ali Jinnah had. It has systematised sectarian violence, amassed economic power for itself that has become an empire at the expense of ordinary citizens, and has asserted itself above the Constitution.

The 27th Constitutional Amendment represents the culmination of seven decades of military supremacy. It marks dictatorship’s institutionalisation, when military rule sheds even the pretence of democracy. The military of Pakistan will continue to dominate the country unless there is a genuine restructuring that calls for true civilian supremacy and there is international pressure to stop funding military domination of Pakistan where generals write their own laws and own the resources of the country that render democratic aspirations meaningless.