When Senator Yusuf Raza Gilani says that “policies must be devised through consultation,” he is not preaching democratic virtue. He is diagnosing Pakistan’s deepest disease: a state that has turned bypassing consultation into its governing creed. What we are watching unfold, from Punjab’s unilateral canal projects to Sindh’s angry walkouts, is not just a spat between two coalition partners. It is the steady dismantling of the very process that binds this federation together.
Punjab insists it has every right to push forward its water projects. Sindh protests that its rights have been trampled. In principle, the Council of Common Interests exists to arbitrate exactly such disputes, but in practice, it has been reduced to ornament, while both sides prefer the theatre of press conferences and the poison of slogans to the discipline of structured dialogue. Water, like flood relief before it, has been turned into a partisan football while the people who depend on it are forced to watch from the sidelines.
This is no passing quarrel. It reflects a deeper pathology in which rulers treat deliberation as delay and consultation as weakness. PTI perfected this style of governance; ruling by ordinance, ballooning public debt past 70 per cent of GDP, doling out reckless amnesties, and shackling the country to yet another IMF programme. The coalition that promised correction has instead reached for the same shortcuts, including but not limited to unilateral revival plans, investment councils stacked with unelected figures, and now water and flood policies announced through megaphones rather than institutions.
The consequences are not abstract. Food inflation touched nearly 40 per cent last year. The rupee slid past 300 to the dollar. Almost 40 per cent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, and in Balochistan, the figure rises to 70 per cent. Each new IMF programme repeats the same bitter script (higher tariffs, higher taxes, higher suffering) imposed without consultation or consent. Investors, meanwhile, stay away, citing exactly what ordinary citizens know: rules here are made in haste and erased at whim.
Expediency is not a tactic. It is the rot itself. A state that makes policy without consultation is not saving time. Pakistan has been doing this for decades, and the fall no longer looks like a possibility. It looks like an inevitability. *