A polity or petri dish?

CONTRARY to the interior minister’s https://www.dawn.com/news/2019599">recent claim, bad governance is not the cause of the recurring collapse of political systems.

It is only a symptom of a deeper systemic malaise — an undemocratic dispensation that allows the rulers to escape political and institutional accountability for their ills and excesses.

The minister’s panacea for bad governance — the creation of more provinces — is also misconceived, if not potentially disastrous for a country already riddled with multiple fault lines.

Enforcing central authority over multiple sub-national units has become increasingly difficult for authoritarian states or contested governments.

Nigeria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Somalia are some of the many countries that have a large number of provinces; yet they are perennially afflicted with bad governance, fractious territories, economic meltdowns, civil wars, armed insurgencies and institutional breakdowns.

The genesis of our systemic maladies can also be traced to a combination of undemocratic and authoritarian models that have been tried for decades on various pretexts — ideology, faith, stability, security, integrity, development, etc — to elude a legitimate federal democracy.

Therefore, the answer to key political questions regarding the state’s foundational objectives, system of governance, people’s rights and liberties, and the distribution of resources within the federation and among the people has never been attempted.

These are basic questions that the first generation of a political leadership must respond to, by way of a social compact that secures legitimacy, recognition, order and cohesion for the newborn state.

Else, these questions hover over regicide, fratricide and every revolt or revolution.

The common thread running through all successful social compacts is the ‘will of the people’.

The people are the bedrock of modern states.

They constitute the foundation of the state and work and sustain it with their blood and sweat.

No polity can stand, let alone perform, without the people as the object and drivers of state-building.

But it is unfortunate that right after independence, a small coterie of elites — political, business, landed and the civil-military establishment — captured power and diverted resources towards their own political and institutional interests.

Constitution-making remained stalled for many years.

And then in 1954, a mentally incapacitated governor-general dissolved the first elected constituent assembly, which had just finished the draft of the constitution, because he feared losing his arbitrary powers.

The common man has borne the crushing burden of failed experiments.

The constitution that was finally enforced in 1956 was neither democratic nor federal.

It artificially created a ‘parity’ between the numerically divergent eastern and western wings of the country, denying the Bengalis their democratic right to rule based on the principle of majoritarianism.

It also arbitrarily erased the western wing’s ethno-cultural diversity by forging a single province (One Unit), to weaken federalism.

But neither scheme worked.

The ensuing political instability and palace intrigues toppled as many as five governments in just two-and-a-half years, making it easier for a scheming and ambitious president to fold up the entire system, putting the country under the first martial law in 1958.

The second exercise in political engineering was no less disastrous.

The 1962 constitution was conceived by Gen Ayub Khan.

He was ably assisted, among others, by a bevy of ambitious technocrats and unscrupulous judges.

Retaining the ill-conceived One Unit and parity, he introduced a presidential system that denied universal adult franchise and sought ‘legitimacy’ from local governments — the basic democrats — which being malleable elected him and his loyalists to the federal and provincial legislatures.

Interestingly, believing that it went against the ‘genius’ of the people, he dispensed with parliamentary democracy — something that India had successfully instituted years before in 1950.

No wonder, the so-called ‘decade of development’ sowed most of the ills that continue to bedevil the political system to this day in the form of authoritarian masquerades, judicial kowtowing, electoral manipulation, ineffectual legislatures, crony capitalism, feudal empowerment, war-mongering, class inequalities, and the erstwhile east-west disparity.

And small wonder that the sham democracy collapsed when protests swept the country in 1969 — another martial law was enforced, civil war broke out and half the country seceded in 1971.

The 1973 Constitution — the third, in 26 years — has been the only compact that nearly reflected the ‘will of the people’, though it was framed by a post-1971 ‘rump’ parliament.

The Constitution was almost consensual because the political leadership enjoyed a considerable degree of latitude in the post-1971 interregnum when the security establishment lay low.

As a result, the Constitution cured much of the earlier ills, providing a fairly workable federal democracy.

It included a parliamentary form of governance, a trichotomous balance of power, incremental autonomy for the provinces, fundamental rights and a fair amount of judicial independence.

Above all, it recognised the people as the ultimate repository of political power and ‘trustees’ of sovereign authority.

Thus, a solid foundation was laid for an institutional democracy.

Had it been allowed to flourish, the country would have had a mature, stable and rules-based democratic order.

But it was not to be.

The elder Bhutto’s authoritarian streak, the opposition’s myopic vision and combative style, and a resurgent security establishment waiting in the wings, collectively brought down the constitutional dispensation in just four years.

In 1977, the country again saw martial law.

This time, the dictator sent an elected prime minister to the gallows.

Since then, the polity has been turned into a petri dish of political engineering, a kaleidoscopic permutation of polities — naked martial laws, rule by a ‘troika’, ‘controlled’ democracy, imported rulers, dummy governments, a ‘hybrid’ model, and so on.

Ironically, all these failed experiments were billed as ‘solutions’ to systemic problems.

In reality, they were organised ‘institutional’ attempts to thwart constitutional democracy.

All along, vested interests thrived, while the common man bore the crushing burden of failed experiments.

But alas, the polity is back on the petri dish.

The proposed scheme of creating more provinces on the pretext of addressing ‘bad governance’ is another experiment to dodge legitimate constitutional governance.

It is bound to fail being superimposed, fanciful and unmanageably disruptive.

The solution lies in a federal democracy — that is the only system that can ensure good governance and devolution to the third tier of governance.

The writer is a lawyer.

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Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2026