The Punjab government goes full Goonda

Seventy-eight years after independence, Punjab is moving with aplomb to legislate a law of such a draconian nature that it would make even the officers of the British Raj blush.

The Punjab Control of Habitual Offenders and Anti-Social Behaviour Bill, 2026, proposes a regime in which the executive can freeze a person’s bank account, seize their property, remove their online presence, confiscate their phone, and place them under electronic surveillance, all on the basis of an intelligence committee’s assessment of their conduct.

The 2026 Bill does not merely replicate the most sordid colonial-era repression, but rather turbo-charges it in what can only be described as a fitting celebration of the unbroken intellectual continuity of our bureaucracy from the colonial era.

The bill has cleared at committee and just needs the Punjab Assembly to vote for it to go live (expected Sunday). The bill was moved by Khalid Mahmood Ranjha of Mandi Bahauddin of the PML-N, a retired district and sessions judge.

Goonda raj

The 2026 Bill finds its intellectual foundations in 1871, when the British enacted the Criminal Tribes Act. The Act classified entire communities as hereditary criminals, subjecting their members to registration, movement restrictions, mandatory roll calls, and settlement in designated enclosures.

The law rode above ordinary criminal procedure, and its punishments were administrative and not judicial. What made it particularly useful to colonial administrators was precisely that it bypassed the evidentiary standards and procedure required by ordinary law for sanctions.

By 1918, colonial administrators wanted to extend this machinery to individuals outside the Criminal Tribes framework. Drawing directly on the Act, the Restriction of Habitual Offenders (Punjab) Act, 1918, was passed, the very law the 2026 Bill now proposes to repeal and replace. Under the 1918 Act, a person could be declared a “habitual offender” and restricted to a specified geographic area, required to report to police, and placed under surveillance, all without a conviction.

The Secretary of State for India in London, reviewing the original 1918 Punjab Habitual Offenders Bill, stated that restricting the movement of and extending police surveillance to individuals not yet convicted of any offence “accepts a principle which has not, I think, found a place in the permanent, as opposed to emergency, legislation of British India”.

In 1959, the military government of Field Marshal Ayub Khan added a second instrument to the toolkit — the West Pakistan Control of Goondas Ordinance. It empowered District Magistrates to declare individuals “goondas” on the basis of their conduct and associations, and to impose restrictions on residence, movement, and activities for up to two years without any requirement of conviction.

What is taking the place of these laws in the form of the 2026 Bill is not a more restrained successor, but a considerably more draconian one.

The 2026 Bill lists twenty-three categories of anti-social behaviour.

Alongside organised crime and drug trafficking sit offences such as using abusive language in public, annoying persons in public spaces, spreading misinformation on social media, and cruelty to animals. Who determines what is “obscene”? What distinguishes “annoying” from ordinary social interaction? Who adjudicates “misinformation”? These determinations are left to the imagination of the intelligence committees that administer the law.

The fact that cruelty to animals is included in the list of sanctionable behaviour shows the purpose of the proposed law is to be as overbroad as possible to provide a ready toolkit of suppression rather than any ideological issues with the underlying conduct per se.

The Punjab government has recently been busy conducting mass culling operations against stray dogs across the province, shooting and poisoning thousands of dogs. The government that has been conducting mass, indiscriminate, illegal slaughter of animals will now criminalise its citizens for cruelty to those same animals. It takes a particular kind of institutional audacity to write a law that you are, at the moment of writing it, violating yourself.

The 2026 Bill also grants District Intelligence Committees the open-ended power to declare any further “set of activities” as anti-social behaviour and hands the bureaucracy the authority to expand the law’s reach without returning to the assembly.

The Bill’s most draconian feature is that sanctions, which should follow a finding of guilt, can be imposed on the basis of charges filed, not crimes proven. A person may be declared a habitual offender, and subjected to mandatory electronic monitoring, based on “credible evidence” or if they have been arrested more than once in connection with scheduled offences. Not convicted. A challan submitted by the police against someone is sufficient to trigger this provision, even if every case against them ultimately ends in acquittal.

In Pakistan’s criminal justice system, where cases can take years or decades to resolve, where the power of arrest is exercised sometimes for reasons entirely unrelated to evidence, and where challans are filed routinely as a matter of prosecutorial form, treating repeated arrest as a proxy for habitual criminality is to punish people for what the police have done to them, not for what they have been proven to have done.

Once a person is declared a habitual offender, the consequences are immediate. The individual must wear an electronic monitoring device for a minimum of three months. They must submit a surety bond, comply with whatever restrictions seen fit to impose, and report to the police station as and when directed. Their photograph, fingerprints, handwriting specimens, biometrics, and potentially DNA are taken and stored. Their name is entered into a district database and the provincial Punjab Habitual Offenders Registry.

Even before the habitual offender track is triggered, the District Intelligence Committee can recommend the imposition of a sweeping range of sanctions on anyone found to have engaged in anti-social behaviour, which includes placement on the Provisional National Identification List (PNIL), impounding or blocking of passports and National Identity Cards, removal of social media accounts and confiscation of mobile phones, laptops, and any data extracted from them, seizure of movable property or attachment of immovable property, freezing of bank accounts, and surveillance using “modern technology”

Most of these require no prior judicial sanction. Property seizure requires Magistrate approval, but within fifteen days of the order already having been executed. The appeals path runs through three successive layers of the same executive structure before reaching a quasi-judicial Tribunal at the fourth stage.

The arc from 1871 to 2026 is one of continuity, notwithstanding ‘independence’ and military coups. The substance underneath the form seems substantially alike.

Header image: 1900’s British India ‘Fight Goondas’. Vintage matchbox. Restored image. Credit: Philip Thornton/Facebook