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ONE good thing that has come out of this whole conversation about building the federation on new foundations is that it has exposed the most opportunistic elements among us. Those who crave the opportunity to enter public life but have no chance to do so as long as Pakistan remains even nominally a democracy are the ones most excited by the idea of dismantling the federal structure and replacing it with some reloaded form of a unitary state from the 1960s.
Let’s get one thing clear. None of this is about bringing ‘good governance’. Those are pious words that are always used to mask impious intentions. This is actually about wrecking the fortresses into which the democratic forces of the country have been forced to retreat. The democratic forces are the political parties, which with all their inadequacies and imperfections, are the only carriers of the people’s will in our society today. There are three main parties — the PTI, PML-N and PPP. Each controls one provincial government. Each is nourished, indeed kept alive, by the resources and powers of the provincial government they control. Without this control, their voice and presence in the country would shrink — much like the PML-Q shrank when it lost control of the federal government in 2008, and then made a spirited attempt to try and gain control of Punjab in 2022.
