EVERY August, we raise the flag and call ourselves free. But on the first morning of that freedom, in 1947, Faiz, in Subh-i-Azadi, looked at the long-awaited dawn and said it was not the one: ‘yeh daagh daagh ujala, yeh shab-gazida sehar’ — this stained, night-bitten dawn is not the morning we had set out for. Seventy-nine years on, our national day deserves an honest question: did we win a country and quietly postpone its freedom? In 1947, we changed the nationality of our rulers and left the harder task — changing the nature of rule — to a later generation. That is our unfinished independence — still ours to finish.
Begin with the one thing the British empire left behind that no repeal can reach: not a law, but a habit of mind. Colonial rule does not merely occupy a land; it occupies the imagination of those it governs, teaching them to see themselves through the ruler’s eyes — as subjects to be managed, not citizens to be served; supplicants at a counter, not owners of the state. Ashis Nandy called colonialism, above all, a colonisation of the mind — a condition that outlives the flag.
This servility was not an accident of empire; it was its design. In 1835, Lord Macaulay told the British that education in India should produce a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect — trained not to rule but to serve. That reflex — to defer, to request rather than require, to treat power as something that happens to us rather than something that belongs to us — is the empire’s most durable export.
A new nation needs strong institutions to hold power to account — parties with roots, a parliament with nerve. We did not yet have them: our leadership was thin and soon thinned further, our parties young and quarrelsome. India inherited a mass movement decades in the making and gave itself a constitution within three years. We took nine — nine years without the rules of a shared game, which are exactly the years in which a political culture is meant to grow.
Into that vacuum stepped the two institutions the empire had built to their fullest strength — the army and the civil service, disciplined and sure of themselves while everything else improvised. The old colonial master had sailed home; a new establishment, home-grown but colonial in instinct, took his chair. That is the quiet tragedy of our first independence: we did not defeat colonialism so much as change its address.
How do we raise citizens — and judges — with the strength to say no when power sits across the table offering everything?
And here I must speak of my own house, for the gravest damage was done not by generals or bureaucrats but by judges. The judiciary was meant to be the citizen’s shield — the one institution whose purpose is to say no to power on the authority of law. But it too was a colonial inheritance, and carried the reflex in its bones: under the Raj it had served the sovereign, not the subject, and at independence it transferred that loyalty from the departed Crown to the new establishment, not the people. So when the tanks rolled, the courts, again and again, said yes. They fashioned a doctrine of necessity to legalise the seizure of power; they swore in usurpers; they dressed lawlessness in the robes of law. The colonial mind inside the judiciary has cost this country more than any single dictator, for it turned the guardian of the Constitution into the notary of its breach.
Why did they give in? For three human reasons that have nothing to do with law. The first is fear: independence has cost judges their careers, their liberty, at times their lives. The second, and the least confessed, is comfort — the office, the title, the house and the car. The third is isolation — the weight of standing alone when colleagues have already found reasons to look away. What resists them is the one thing a law degree does not issue: character.
So the question for our second independence is disarmingly simple: how do we raise citizens — and judges — with the strength to say no when power sits across the table, speaking softly and offering everything? Here I have reached a conviction that may sound strange: that strength is not built by law. It is built by the humanities. History dismantles the oldest alibi of every surrender — the plea that ‘these times are unprecedented’ and so exempt from principle; whoever knows history has heard that lie before, and knows how it ends. Philosophy teaches us to reason about ends, not merely means. Literature is our only sustained practice at inhabiting another human being, without which justice is merely filing.
That is why the second independence will begin not in a courtroom or a parliament but in a classroom. If we want judges who will not sign the unjust order, we must form them long before they reach the bench — students given not only the mechanics of the law but a settled conviction about what the Constitution is for. The student of conviction becomes the honest lawyer; the honest lawyer, the fearless bar leader; the fearless bar leader, the judge who says no. Give a generation that conviction and no amendment can take it from them, for a conviction cannot be amended.
Pakistan was dreamed by a poet and argued into being by a lawyer — Iqbal’s conviction, Jinnah’s case. Somewhere we kept the lawyer and forgot the poet, and were left with arguments but no convictions. This Independence Day, let us call the poet back — into our schools, our courts, and our idea of what an educated citizen owes his country. The dawn Faiz described is still stained. He told us to keep walking — ‘chale chalo’ — for the true morning has not yet come.
The writer is a former senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He is currently the Distinguished Chair in Constitutionalism & Justice and Professor of Practice at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, Lums.
Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2026