In Pakistan’s judicial landscape, silence often speaks loudest. From politically sensitive disqualifications to military court rulings, judgments are crafted in a syntax that privileges strategic ambiguity over clarity. Language becomes the cloak beneath which institutional power hides, deflects, and occasionally postures.
Legal discourse often features passive constructions (“rights were violated,” “anomalies were observed”) and nominalizations (“breach of conduct,” “administrative lapse”) that diffuse agency. These grammatical choices create distance between legal consequence and legal responsibility.
Key actors are frequently unnamed. When judgments refer to “powerful quarters” or “external influence,” they invoke specters without identification—allowing the court to gesture at power without confronting it. This deliberate opacity preserves judicial dignity while avoiding institutional confrontation.
The most revealing silences, however, lie in what is left out. In high-stakes cases, judgments may fail to address core constitutional questions, dismissing them as “non-justiciable” or resolving matters on “technical grounds.” Such omissions are not oversights; they are discursive tactics to preserve institutional equilibrium while bypassing political accountability.
This pattern is visible in rulings on electoral disqualifications, extensions of military service, or dismissals of government. Where clarity might trigger political upheaval, the court opts for a calculated vagueness that satisfies the letter of law but evades its democratic spirit.
Media reporting compounds the problem. Headlines extract simplistic binaries from complex judgments—“Victory for democracy,” “Judiciary sides with state”—reducing nuanced silence to definitive proclamations. The court’s opacity thus becomes a blank screen onto which every stakeholder projects its preferred reading.
Yet silence is not neutral. In a legal culture where dissent is rare and deference is expected, what is unsaid can shape outcomes as much as rulings themselves. When courts refuse to name military overreach, or avoid adjudicating civilian supremacy, they participate in a performative ritual of restraint that reinscribes power hierarchies.
Still, cracks have emerged. A few landmark dissents, written with linguistic precision and moral clarity, have disrupted this norm—asserting that silence is not always judicial prudence, but institutional abdication. These judgments remind us that language, even in robes, must speak truth to power.
Judicial legitimacy cannot be sustained through legalese and ambiguity alone. For justice to function in a democracy, it must also be linguistically legible. The people must not only hear verdicts—they must understand them.
