When the gavel falls on the grave

There is a peculiar cruelty in a judicial system that hears a disabled man for more than half a decade, engages with his plea in apparent earnest, marshals the machinery of the state in his favour, and then informs him — with the studied solemnity of Latin maxims and starched black coats — that he has wasted his time. Pakistan’s judiciary, the constitutional sentinel envisioned by the framers as the last refuge of the citizen, has come to resemble less a temple of justice than a vast, ornate waiting room — one in which the meek, the maimed and the moneyless are seated indefinitely, and from which many leave only feet first. To speak of “justice delayed is justice denied” in this country is no longer to invoke a hoary aphorism; it is to describe, with grim fidelity, the operating philosophy of the system itself.

The consequences of this to consider, with unflinching attention, the case of Tahir Abbas — a disabled man from the backward reaches of Muzaffargarh in South Punjab, struggling under the weight of poverty and the responsibility of a family that depends upon him for survival, particularly his children whose schooling and nourishment hang in the balance. When a government teaching position was advertised through the National Testing Service (NTS), Tahir Abbas applied under the disability quota reserved by law for persons precisely like him. His application was rejected on the Kafkaesque grounds that he had not applied under the disabled quota — he made repeated representations to the NTS, furnishing every conceivable proof of his eligibility. The bureaucratic wall remained immovable. With no other recourse, Tahir Abbas approached the Lahore High Court, attaching all documentary evidence and pleading for justice. 

What followed was not the expedient relief that justice demands, but a judicial odyssey that consumed six years of his life — six years during which the court, far from dismissing the matter at the threshold, actively accepted the petition, engaged in sustained correspondence with the School Education Department to ascertain vacancy availability, and allowed the case to traverse the full gauntlet of bureaucratic red tape. Hearing after hearing was conducted. Dates were fixed and adjourned. Judges changed. Files grew thicker. And through it all, Tahir Abbas remained in the earnest belief — a belief the court’s own conduct nourished — that relief was forthcoming.

Every procedural engagement during those six years pointed toward justice. The court had already scrutinised the petition and found it worthy of admission. The NTS had confirmed his application under the disability quota. The School Education Department had communicated on vacancy particulars. The matter had been actively pursued, not neglected. The interim signs were all favourable. The conclusion, by every reasonable expectation, ought to have been the grant of the relief sought.

Instead, after six years — six years during which a disabled man from one of the most underdeveloped regions of Punjab spent his meagre resources on legal fees, travelled to hearings he could scarcely afford, and sustained the flickering hope that the Republic’s highest judicial forum in the province would vindicate his statutory right — the High Court disposed of the matter with a procedural ruling that the National Testing Service did not fall within the court’s jurisdiction. The petition was declared not maintainable. And then came the final indignity: Tahir Abbas was told, in effect, that he had wasted his time.

The bitter irony is unmistakable. It was not Tahir Abbas who wasted six years. It was the judicial system that wasted his time, his money, his hope, and — most cruelly — his opportunity for government employment. By the time the gavel fell, the age limit for the post had elapsed. The window, already narrow for a disabled man in an unforgiving society, had been slammed shut not by his own conduct, but by six years of judicial proceedings that culminated in a jurisdictional objection that could have been raised on day one. Tahir Abbas is now overage. Once and for all. The state that acknowledged his disability, accepted his application, and engaged him in six years of litigation, has left him with nothing — no appointment, no compensation, no apology, and no future.

Tahir Abbas is not an aberration. He is one face among countless others — the unnamed disabled applicants from Rajanpur, the scheduled caste candidates from Rahim Yar Khan, the meritorious poor from DG Khan — who discover that the law’s promise on paper bears little resemblance to its practice in the corridors of power. For every Tahir Abbas who summoned the courage and resources to approach the High Court, there are scores who could not, who silently absorbed their exclusion, who watched seats reserved for the vulnerable quietly diverted through the well-oiled machinery of patronage and connection. The disability quota, the rural quota, the merit criteria — all are rendered meaningless when the ultimate dispensations flow not to those who qualify, but to those who are connected: the nephews of parliamentarians from upper Punjab, the protégés of feudal influence-peddlers who occupy the treasury and opposition benches of the National and Provincial Assemblies alike.

This is not a malfunction of the system. It is the system functioning exactly as designed — a system where procedural delay serves as a mechanism of exclusion, where institutional indifference wears the dignified mask of judicial restraint, and where the vulnerable are processed through years of litigation only to be released at the far end with a polite observation that their cause, however sympathetic, is technically beyond remedy. The Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan reports approximately 2.14 million cases pending across the country’s courts. The World Justice Project’s 2024 Rule of Law Index ranks Pakistan 129th out of 142 countries — and in the 2025 Index, the country’s score actually declined further.

The causes of this paralysis are manifold, and they are deeply entrenched. Pakistan has one of the lowest judge-to-population ratios in the world, with the Judicial Commission of Pakistan estimating that the system needs thousands more judicial officers merely to keep pace with current filings. Vacant judicial posts remain unfilled for years, bogged down in politicised appointment processes and bureaucratic inertia. The National Corruption Perception Survey ranks the judiciary as the third most corrupt sector in Pakistan, after the police and tendering authorities. The Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898, and the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 — both products of the British colonial era — still govern much of Pakistan’s legal process, their archaic procedures providing ample opportunity for the dilatory tactics that have become the hallmark of Pakistani litigation.

If the civil side bleeds litigants of years, the criminal side, in its most extreme manifestation, bleeds them of life itself. Take the case of Mazhar Hussain, a labourer accused of murder in 1997, sentenced to death in 2004, and confined to the condemned cell for thirteen years before the Supreme Court, in October 2016, acquitted him of all charges — two years after he had died in prison of cardiac arrest, still awaiting the vindication that finally came as a posthumous postscript. Consider, more terribly still, the brothers Ghulam Qadir and Ghulam Sarwar, hanged in October 2015 in Bahawalpur for a 2002 murder, and acquitted by the Supreme Court the very next year on the basis of discrepancies in eyewitness testimony so glaring that one wonders by what alchemy they had ever sustained a conviction. When the order of acquittal arrived at the jail, the warders are said to have replied, with a candour that ought to chill the marrow of every member of the Bar: we have already hanged them. The gavel, when it falls, ought to fall on the graves of the hanged. In Pakistan, too often, it falls upon the grave.

Yet statistics, however grim, cannot capture the lived reality of a man who watched six years of his life dissolve in courtrooms while his children grew hungrier and his hair grew greyer. No index measures the psychological violence of sustained hope systematically crushed. No report quantifies the cost of a government job that never came — the modest salary that would have lifted a family from destitution, the dignity of employment that would have restored a disabled man’s standing in his community, the education his children might have received had the relief arrived in time rather than as a posthumous procedural footnote.

Justice delayed may indeed be justice denied, as the ancient maxim reminds us. But in Pakistan today, justice is not merely delayed; it is systematically deconstructed, suffocated by colonial-era procedures, and sold to the highest bidder in corrupt corridors. Until Pakistan’s rulers muster the courage to reform this broken machinery — to fill judicial vacancies, modernize procedures, protect the vulnerable, and ensure that no citizen waits six years to be told they knocked on the wrong door — the promise engraved in the Constitution will remain what it has become: beautiful words on paper, mocked by reality in the lives of millions. The scales of justice in Pakistan do not merely hang in imbalance; they have become an instrument of oppression, weighing heaviest upon those who can least bear the load. Until that changes, the citizen will continue to discover, as Tahir Abbas did, that the most reliable judgment is the one that never quite arrives — and that in the long colonnaded corridors where the Republic keeps its conscience, the most enduring sound is not the gavel at all, but the soft, insistent rustle of a file being marked, once again, for the next date.