Daily Times

This question has been extensively debated by political scientists elaborating and analyzing different aspects of the federal governance comparing and contrasting it with that of unitary states as practiced in the world. The entire debate can broadly be summed up in a few sentences. A federal country comprises many states with legally delimited geographical boundaries, constitutionally defined and well structured parameters of governance and legislation, autonomy and powers to legislate and raise finances, plan development and design a sound system of local governments where as the unitary countries have no autonomous states and are ruled by all powerful governments from their capitals. The federal and unitary forms of governance have their own merits and demerits. The federations all over the world as such have not posed any problem of governance. Nevertheless, they have been problematic in the developing countries including Pakistan.

Actually, Pakistan did not fit into the framework of a unitary country nor could it be forcibly molded into that form of governance. The geographical entities that midwifed the birth of Pakistan had their own national standing, language, culture and legally defined boundaries with a long history as politically independent national territories. Their annexation into Pakistan was voluntary with the exception of two territories (Balochistan and KPK) where coercive force and political trickery was applied to annex them into the new country. The founder of the country had no doubts about the federal feature of the country nor did the local leaders have any apprehensions about their territories losing autonomous status. Unfortunately, the new central leadership with a centripetal mindset set the nation building task on a meandering path to a de factori unitary state.

Their moves resulted in the resentment of Bengalis on the language issue, rebellion of Balochs on the forcible annexation of their territory, alienation of Pakhtun leaders on the coercive conduct of the referendum and the resistance of prominent Sindhi Muslim Leaguers on the massive induction of migrants into their province; designation of Karachi as a federal city; allocation of a substantial quota of the provincial and federal services for the migrants and introduction of the Evacuee Property Scheme. This aberration did not stop here and finally culminated into the total abolition of the autonomous status of these territorial entities with their amalgamation into the repressive One-Unit, invented by a bureaucratic and military mind (Iskander Mirza and General Ayub Khan), lasting effectively for a decade and half from 1954 to 1969.

The federations are easy to govern provided the Constitution of the country is treated as sacrosanct and followed in letter and spirit

The One-Unit had two concomitant consequences. It helped create and strengthen a mindset in the Punjab-dominated political leadership, bureaucracy and security establishment faithfully believing in a strong centre for political, financial and security reasons. Simultaneously, it helped accelerate centrifugal tendencies in all the remaining territorial components of the country. We witnessed an explosion of extra nationalism and an outburst of nationalist demands that followed the abolition of the One-Unit triggering an intense and hostile competition between the centripetal and the centrifugal political forces in the post-One Unit country that ultimately climaxed in the secession of Bengal. This contest has continued undermining our national harmony for the past five decades.

Another ramification of the One-Unit was that the central regime and the central bureaucracy did not surmount their all pervasive regal propensity for ruling the country with a strong disdain for any difference of opinion voiced by a province or a provincial leader. This asymmetrical equation between the central authority and the provinces was phenomenally transformed by the 18th Amendment in the Constitution silently altering our political landscape and impregnating the federal units with substantial political and financial autonomy. It seems the successive federal regimes have not been able to absorb the far reaching constitutional changes that the amendment has incorporated in the federal structure of the country.

The federations are easy to govern provided the Constitution of the country is treated as sacrosanct and followed in letter and spirit. Rather, federations render the task of central authority quite comfortable leaving it with a few subjects to be managed by a small, responsive and efficient cabinet and transferring the majority of the subjects to the provincial or state governments. It is not so in Pakistan. We have witnessed in wonderment the disproportionate size of the federal cabinets since the early 1990s. These federal cabinets have numbered beyond 100 Ministers and Special Assistants with an ever bulging unproductive spending. We feel ashamed to compare these overblown federal regimes with those of the developed world. They have small cabinets with minimum overhead expenditures.

This nation has long past the repressive eras of One-Unit, military dictatorships and autocratic civilian regimes. The social media has revolutionized the mind of the new generation. We observed the power of social media in the Arab Spring. It is demonstrating the same power in Pakistan. It was amazing to see the Sindhi youth taking up their smart phones and launching a twitter trend against the Diamer Bhasha Dam and posting 400,000 messages within three days. More amazing was their twitter campaign against ‘No bogus domiciles’ from Sindh. The campaign hit the fabulous figure of one million tweets within a couple of days recorded thus far as the top trend in Pakistan. One can well imagine the humming wave of awareness lashing the shores of Sindh.

The Sindhi youth has emerged as the most determined warrior against the grab of their precious lands by outliers or agencies, night raids on their water rights, denial of their share of jobs in the federal Ministries, departments, agencies, corporations and Public sector enterprises, all the three services of the national armed forces, and the industrial, economic and financial, and educational institutions including public schools, colleges and universities established and run by them. They want to have their due share in the apple pie as constitutionally mandated. They are feeling the squeeze of the economic constraints aggravated by the unobtrusive rush of outsiders obtaining bogus domiciles and occupying jobs and the huge presence of foreign refugees and aliens in their capital city.

(To be concluded).

The author was a member of the Foreign Service of Pakistan and he has authored two books