One signature was all it took. On 24 October 1954, the Governor General of Pakistan, Malik Ghulam Muhammad, dissolved the country's first Constituent Assembly — the elected body that had spent seven years writing Pakistan's first constitution and was almost finished. Its members were sent home. But one man refused to go home: the Assembly's own Speaker, Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan, took the Governor General to court. This is episode 5 of our History of Pakistan series: the Speaker versus the Governor General, Pakistan's first great courtroom battle.
The Speaker
Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan was born in 1889 in Faridpur, in East Bengal, in a humble farming family. He studied English and law, became a lawyer, and spent decades in politics in Bengal. In 1948 he became President, or Speaker, of Pakistan's Constituent Assembly, the body elected to give the new country its first constitution. By October 1954 that Assembly had been working for over seven years and was close to finishing. It had also just moved to limit the Governor General's powers, so he could act only on the advice of his ministers. Ghulam Muhammad answered by dissolving the Assembly itself.
By What Authority?
The Speaker's answer was a piece of paper. On 7 November 1954, a writ petition in his name was filed in the Chief Court of Sindh, in Karachi, under Section 223-A of the Government of India Act 1935. In plain words, he asked the new ministers a simple question: by what authority do you hold office? If the Governor General had no power to dissolve a sovereign constitution-making body, then the dissolution was unlawful, and the Assembly was still alive. He was not asking for power for himself. He was asking the court to defend the Assembly he had presided over for six years.
Won in Sindh, Reversed on a Technicality
In February 1955, the Chief Court of Sindh gave its answer, and the Speaker won. The court held that the Governor General had no power to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, and that his assent was not needed for the Assembly's acts when it sat as a constitution-making body. The dissolution was declared invalid. For a brief moment, the Assembly was legally alive again. But the Federation appealed to the Federal Court of Pakistan, where the case was heard in March 1955 under Chief Justice Muhammad Munir. The question was not whether the dissolution was right. The question was whether the Governor General had ever given his assent to Section 223-A itself, the very law that gave the Sindh court the power to hear writ petitions. On 21 March 1955, the Federal Court decided, by four votes to one, that he had not. Section 223-A was never valid law, the Sindh court had never had the power to hear the case, and its judgment fell — without the court ever deciding that the dissolution was lawful. Justice A. R. Cornelius was the only judge who disagreed.
The Door the Verdict Opened
Historians say this verdict opened a dangerous door. Weeks later, in a follow-on case, the court openly leaned on what became known as the doctrine of necessity, the idea that state necessity can excuse acts outside the constitution. That idea returned again and again in Pakistan's later history, whenever assemblies were dissolved or martial law was imposed. A second Constituent Assembly was convened, and Pakistan finally received its first constitution in 1956. Tamizuddin himself returned to politics, and in 1962 he was once again elected Speaker of the National Assembly, a post he held until his death in 1963. He lost his case. But the question he asked in 1954 — by what authority? — has never really gone away.
Watch the full episode on the Daily Info Dose channel, and read the other episodes of this series in our Blogs section.
Watch the video: The Speaker Who Took the Governor General to Court | History of Pakistan #5 on YouTube. This article is the full written version of the video, in simple English. See all articles on the Blogs page and more videos on the History Series page.