In the heart of Karachi stands a 19th-century Gothic building that now houses a bustling spice and produce bazaar. A weathered plaque says it was built to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, hence its name: Empress Market. No marker records what happened on this ground before the market rose over it.

During the 1857 uprising, which the British called the Mutiny and many in the subcontinent call the First War of Independence, rebel sepoys were publicly executed on the parade ground where the market now stands, colonial military records show. Some were tied to the mouths of cannons and blown apart. Local historians say the market was built partly to keep the site from becoming a memorial to them. A place of martyrdom was replaced with a monument to empire.

After independence, Pakistan kept the sanitized version. Nothing at the bazaar commemorates the executed men. The executions were carried out on the authority of Bartle Frere, the British commissioner in Sindh.

A short walk away, at the elite Karachi Grammar School, students still cheer for Frere, because one of the school’s four houses bears his name. Another is named for General Charles Napier, who led the British conquest of Sindh in 1843.

Nearby stand the colonial-era social clubs that once projected British authority and groomed an Anglicized native aristocracy to help govern the empire. After independence, they became exclusive networking hubs with hereditary memberships and long waiting lists. There, a new ruling elite modeled itself on British high society.

This romance with the colonial past is not merely an elite lifestyle choice. It is coded into the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the army and the police, which have never severed their founding colonial logic despite repeated reforms. Nearly 80 years after independence, that logic remains deeply entrenched.

Pakistan won its independence in 1947. Some of the chains were never removed.

- Owais Tohid

Take the law itself. After 1857, the Raj built a legal architecture of policing and surveillance. The Penal Code of 1860 defines offenses and punishments. A criminal procedure code governs arrest, search, bail, remand, trial and sentencing. Pakistan still runs on both.

Section 144 of the procedure code was once a tool to suppress political dissent. Today it is used to ban rallies, impose curfews and prohibit gatherings across entire cities and provinces. Rights groups have long called it a draconian colonial-era law and demanded its repeal.

Citizens still need a “good moral character” certificate from the local police for personal identity documentation. And Pakistan did not merely inherit colonial powers; it renewed them. The Maintenance of Public Order ordinance, passed in 1960, and which legal experts trace to the colonial-era Rowlatt Act of 1919, lets authorities hold a person for months on suspicion alone.

“It’s a system based on controlling the population rather than providing justice to people,” says Barrister Salahuddin Ahmed, a former president of the Sindh High Court Bar Association. “Preventive detention is antithetical to a modern democratic polity.”

The reason these systems survive lies in Pakistan’s first decades. The new state inherited institutions built for control, not transformation. They were designed to make a diverse population governable, enforce obedience, enable extraction and protect imperial interests.

Pakistan also inherited a well-developed bureaucracy and a well-trained army, while its political institutions were new and weak. The military and civil service became the dominant decision-makers, and "loyal" landowners were their chief beneficiaries. For more than two decades, this trio ruled largely unchecked, sidelining elected representatives through direct military takeovers and constant interference in politics.

Whenever the arrangement was challenged, the judiciary shielded it. In doing so, it became a power center in its own right and helped the military-bureaucratic nexus tighten its grip on the political order.

Real reform would mean dismantling a colonial architecture built on executive supremacy, and the military, bureaucracy and judiciary have little incentive to do that. Reforms announced with fanfare are quietly abandoned. The result is a fragile democracy in which politicians alone are blamed for corruption and poor governance.

Politics carries its own colonial inheritance. The British secured the loyalty of maharajas, nawabs and tribal chiefs through the princely states and hereditary succession. Pakistan’s dynastic politics mirrors that bargain. The state’s continued patronage of tribal chiefs and feudal lords buys their loyalty and keeps the inherited system running smoothly.

Lahore tells the same story. The colonial administration founded Aitchison College in 1886 to educate the sons of princely rulers, chiefs and Punjab’s landed aristocracy, and modeled it on British public schools. It remains prized for its 200-acre grounds, Victorian-Mughal architecture and politically powerful alumni.

A few kilometers away is Shadman Chowk, a roundabout on the site of the jail where Bhagat Singh was hanged in 1931. Singh was a revolutionary who fought for independence from British rule. Civil society groups have repeatedly pushed to rename the roundabout Bhagat Singh Chowk. Each time, the plans have been shelved amid legal challenges and opposition from right-wing groups. In its reply to the Lahore High Court, the Metropolitan Corporation of Lahore included a brief by a retired naval commodore, Tariq Majeed, which said Singh “was not a revolutionary but a criminal, a terrorist in today’s terms, as he killed a British police officer.” The court dismissed the renaming petition filed by the Bhagat Singh Memorial Foundation early this year.

Perhaps the strangest symbol of this legacy is a tree that has been under arrest for more than a century. In 1898, in Landi Kotal near the Khyber Pass, a drunken British officer reportedly imagined the tree was lunging at him and ordered it placed under military arrest. Soldiers bound it in heavy iron chains. It remains chained today, a curiosity for visitors.

Pakistan won its independence in 1947. Some of the chains were never removed.

Owais Tohid has reported extensively on war and conflict in Asia for 30 years and witnessed the rise and fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. He has also covered the Palestinian conflict in the Occupied Territories and worked for the BBC World Service, AFP and CS Monitor. X: @OwaisTohid