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Constitution And "Extraconstitution": Emergency Powers In Postcolonial Pakistan And India, Anil Kalhan
Constitution And "Extraconstitution": Emergency Powers In Postcolonial Pakistan And India, Anil Kalhan
Anil Kalhan
This essay explores the experiences with emergency and emergency-like powers in postcolonial Pakistan and India to illustrate the ways in which constitutional and extraconstitutional states of exception can converge in their application. The experiences in Pakistan with what I term its "extraconstitution" - illustrated most recently by the state of "emergency" declared by Pervez Musharraf in 2007 - demonstrate, perhaps unsurprisingly, that extraconstitutional assertions of emergency powers can provide a ready template for authoritarian rulers to usurp power, violate fundamental rights, and transform the constitutional landscape in the guise of addressing a crisis. At the same time, the authoritarianism in …