If history has one enduring lesson, it is that governments rarely surrender extraordinary powers once they acquire them. The language changes. The justifications evolve. New threats replace old ones. Yet the underlying logic remains remarkably constant: concentrate authority in the executive, weaken judicial oversight and persuade the public that liberty is a reasonable price to pay for security.
Punjab now appears determined to prove that colonial governance never truly departed in 1947. It merely changed its flag. The passage of the Punjab Defamation Act, 2024 and the proposed Punjab Control of Habitual Offenders and Anti-Social Behaviour Bill, 2026, reveal not two isolated legislative initiatives but a coherent governing philosophy. The first sought to regulate what citizens may say. The second seeks to regulate who they may become. Together they represent an alarming expansion of executive authority over speech, property, privacy and personal liberty.
What makes this trajectory particularly troubling is not merely the severity of the measures themselves but the remarkable ease with which colonial methods have been repackaged for the digital age. The Punjab Defamation Act of 2024 was introduced amid loud protests from journalists, civil society organisations and opposition parties. The Punjab Assembly nevertheless passed it in haste, refusing even a brief postponement to permit wider consultation with stakeholders. Journalists walked out of the assembly in protest while opposition legislators tore copies of the bill inside the chamber. More than 80 civil society organisations subsequently condemned the legislation as an authoritarian attempt to suppress criticism and shield public officials from accountability.
Their concerns were hardly exaggerated. The Act established special tribunals with powers to hear defamation complaints on an accelerated basis, allowed substantial preliminary financial penalties before a full hearing and excluded the ordinary safeguards provided by the law of evidence. Legal experts warned that it undermined the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial while granting the executive an extraordinary role in the composition of tribunals adjudicating politically sensitive disputes. Particularly alarming was the law’s sweeping definition of journalists and newspapers, broad enough to encompass ordinary social media users. In effect, every citizen with a smartphone became a potential defendant.
Government ministers insisted that the legislation merely sought to combat fake news and malicious accusations. Yet democratic societies have long recognised that protecting reputations cannot serve as a licence to intimidate critics. Public officials, precisely because they wield public power, must tolerate greater scrutiny than private citizens. Democracies flourish when governments endure criticism, not when they criminalise it. Barely two years later, the Punjab government has returned with even more sweeping legislation. If the Defamation Act targeted expression, the Punjab Control of Habitual Offenders and Anti-Social Behaviour Bill, 2026, targets existence itself.
It reaches back not to any modern democratic tradition but to some of the darkest chapters of British colonial rule. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 classified entire communities as hereditary criminals. The Restriction of Habitual Offenders (Punjab) Act of 1918 expanded surveillance to include individuals who had never been convicted of offences. The West Pakistan Control of Goondas Ordinance of 1959 further empowered administrators to restrict movement without judicial conviction. Instead of repudiating these colonial precedents, the proposed 2026 Bill embraces and modernises them. Indeed, it improves upon colonial repression in one important respect.
The British Empire never possessed facial recognition software, biometric databases, electronic ankle monitors, digital surveillance systems or the ability to erase a citizen’s online existence at the click of a button. Twenty-first-century technology has simply made nineteenth-century authoritarianism vastly more efficient. The Bill contains 23 categories of so-called anti-social behaviour. Some involve genuinely serious crimes such as organised crime or narcotics trafficking. Others are astonishingly vague. Citizens may face sanctions for using abusive language, annoying persons in public spaces or spreading misinformation online. Such elastic concepts are invitations to arbitrary enforcement.
Who decides what constitutes annoyance? Who determines misinformation? Who distinguishes political satire from malicious falsehood? The Bill largely entrusts these decisions to executive intelligence committees rather than independent courts. Such vagueness is rarely accidental. Laws framed in imprecise language maximise official discretion while minimising legal certainty. Citizens cannot regulate their conduct if they cannot predict how the state will interpret its own rules. Even more disturbing is the Bill’s treatment of criminal responsibility. A person may be declared a habitual offender not because guilt has been established beyond reasonable doubt but because police have filed a challan or because multiple arrests have occurred. This distinction is fundamental. Arrest reflects police suspicion, not judicial determination. Charges reflect prosecutorial decisions, not criminal guilt. Pakistan’s criminal justice system is burdened by delayed trials, politically motivated prosecutions and prolonged investigations. To transform repeated arrests into evidence of habitual criminality effectively allows executive agencies to manufacture future sanctions through their own discretionary actions.
The constitutional presumption of innocence becomes meaningless. Once designated a habitual offender, an individual enters an elaborate architecture of surveillance. Electronic monitoring devices may be imposed. Biometric information, fingerprints, handwriting samples and potentially DNA may be permanently stored. Citizens may be compelled to report regularly to police stations while their names are entered into official registries. Even before that designation occurs, District Intelligence Committees may recommend freezing bank accounts, confiscating passports, seizing mobile phones and computers, removing social media accounts, attaching property and conducting electronic surveillance using unspecified modern technologies.
Most of these sanctions require little or no meaningful judicial oversight before implementation. The executive effectively becomes investigator, prosecutor, adjudicator and, in many cases, executioner of administrative punishment. The similarities between the 2024 and 2026 laws are striking. Both diminish ordinary judicial safeguards, create parallel institutional structures, rely heavily upon executive discretion, and employ vague terminology capable of expansive interpretation. Both were criticised by journalists, lawyers, civil society organisations and human rights defenders and both were justified in the name of public order. Neither shows confidence that ordinary constitutional institutions remain sufficient to govern society.
Perhaps the most revealing feature of the proposed Habitual Offenders Bill is its extraordinary power, allowing District Intelligence Committees to identify additional categories of anti-social behaviour without returning to the provincial assembly. Legislatures exist precisely because elected representatives, rather than unelected officials, should determine the boundaries of lawful conduct. Delegating such broad law-making authority to administrative committees weakens democratic accountability itself.
At a recent discussion hosted by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, lawyers and academics warned that the Bill’s implementation would effectively transform Punjab into an open prison, where surveillance replaces liberty as the organising principle of governance. They argued that the proposed legislation reverses the very foundations of criminal justice by treating accusation as sufficient justification for punishment. These warnings deserve serious consideration rather than dismissal.
Supporters argue that extraordinary crime requires extraordinary laws. Yet history offers little evidence that sacrificing civil liberties produces lasting public security. Colonial governments justified exceptional powers in the name of stability. Military rulers invoked national security. Modern governments invoke misinformation, terrorism and organised crime. The vocabulary evolves while the administrative instinct remains remarkably consistent. Democratic governments distinguish themselves not by the absence of criminal threats but by their refusal to abandon constitutional principles when confronting them. Pakistan’s constitution promises due process, equality before law, protection of property and freedom of expression. Those guarantees become meaningful precisely when governments face criticism, unrest or political opposition.
The writer is dean of the faculty of liberal arts at a private university in Karachi. He tweets/posts @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at: [email protected]
