Why blame Zia alone?

Salman Zafar has a newspaper blog article that points out that the rot in Pakistan long precedes General Zia-ul-Haq, whom it is fashionable nowadays, to blame for Pakistan's ills.

These include the Objectives Resolution, 1949, which bound state and religion together; the Doctrine of Necessity, 1954, that enabled constitutional processes to be broken at will; the One Unit program, 1954, that made West Pakistan into one province to try to match East Pakistan; the Constitution of 1956, that made Pakistan into an Islamic Republic, and gave the President the right to declare emergency; the first coup of 1958; the Constitution of 1962 that set up the Council of Islamic Ideology; the unequal treatment of East Pakistan that created massive unrest 1965-1970; the denial of the right of the East Pakistan based Awami League to form the government after it won the elections; the genocide during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971; the second amendment to the Constitution of 1973 that declared Ahmadis as non-Muslims.

Court's powers

The Pakistani judiciary granted the Governor-General the power to dissolve the Constituent Assembly.

Jinnah's powers

Yasser Latif Hamdani makes the claim

There are many myths that are woven around Jinnah’s period as Governor-General of Pakistan, one of which was forwarded by Campbell Johnson who inaccurately claimed in his book Mission With Mountbatten that Jinnah applied for powers under the Ninth Schedule of the Government of India Act 1935 (GOIA 1935). It was the Ninth Schedule of the GOIA 1935 that strengthened the Governor-General and gave him powers to ensure passage of bills in a form that had been recommended by the Governor-General. From July 19, 1947 onwards, the Ninth Schedule was no longer available.

Myth?
(Also see this on the Cabinet Mission Plan web-site)

Pakistan and Section 93 of the Government of India Act 1935

Yasser Latif Hamdani has articles (1, 2, 3) in the Daily Times of Pakistan, on the vexed question of how democratic in spirit Jinnah was around 1947. These articles were provoked by a journalist (probably Najam Sethi, Aapas Ki Baat, December 14, 2011, 1, 2) who wrote:

A leading journalist, who is one of the finest journalists in my opinion, recently levelled four accusations at Jinnah, which he described as the reason Pakistani democracy has not flourished. First, that Jinnah chose to be the Governor-General instead of prime minister; second, that he concentrated power in his own hands; third, that he dismissed the NWFP [now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa] Assembly; and fourth, that Jinnah chose Urdu as the ‘national’ language.

The purpose of this note is to examine one of the claims made in the Hamdani article and show it to be likely to be wrong.