A constitutional petition filed in 2016, last fixed for hearing in February 2018, with nobody appearing for the petitioner ever since — on 02 October 2026, a division bench of the Sindh High Court at Hyderabad (Justice Adnan-ul-Karim Memon, author; Justice Muhammad Jaffer Raza) finally closed the file. Ghulam Mohammad's petition against the Province of Sindh and others (1550 of 2016) was dismissed in default.
The court's reasoning was short and unsurprising: the petitioner had prima facie lost interest in the lis. When a petitioner neither appears nor prosecutes for the better part of a decade, the court is left with no option but dismissal in default. Nothing was decided on the merits — the underlying grievance, whatever it was, was never examined.
Constitutional petitions under Article 199 are often a citizen's last resort against state action, which makes abandonment particularly costly: the petitioner loses not just the case but the remedy. For litigants, the message mirrors the day's tax-reference dismissals from the Karachi bench: courts will not babysit your file. If circumstances change, withdraw it cleanly; if you still want relief, prosecute it actively.
For lawyers, there is a file-management moral. Old constitutional petitions have a way of surviving in office records long after the client has moved on — until the court calls them and nobody answers. Periodic file audits, client confirmations, and formal withdrawals where instructions have lapsed would prevent exactly this outcome. Muqadma zinda rakhna wakeel ki zimmedari hai — the court's patience, as this case shows, is long but not infinite.