“Salus populi suprema lex” is a Latin phrase meaning “the welfare of the people is the supreme law.” This legal maxim emphasizes the principle that the safety, health, and well-being of the public should be the highest priority in law and governance.

Mirza knew the algebra of silence. In 1960, his grandfather watched the capital rise. Planners promised the city would soon find its voice. Fifty-five years later, it spoke, briefly, like rain on borrowed clouds, then the silence returned, countersigned and archived.

In 1978 a bureaucrat died mid-audit; his ghost, denied an exit protocol under the Ordinance, lodged in Mirza’s spine. Since then, every impossibility arrived with a reference number.

For five and a half decades, citizens were told to lodge complaints with a body that no longer existed, and pay taxes to offices they could neither question nor remove. The Capital Development Authority, born in 1960 to build the city and step aside, never stepped. Section 49G crowned it immortal: its provisions “shall have effect notwithstanding anything to the contrary.”

Then came November 2015, the miracle. Article 140A of the Constitution had promised elected local governments since 2010. The........

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