“A COUNTRY’S constitution”, Thomas Paine cautioned in The Rights of Man, “is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government”. More than two centuries ago (1787), 55 Americans worked through the sweltering heat of a Philadelphia summer to forge one of the most enduring political compromises which has stood the test of time.

In Pakistan too, a Constitution committee, with Mr Abdul Hafeez Pirzada as chairman and 24 members met in Islamabad on October 9, 1972, in the backdrop of a bloody civil war and loss of half the country, to prepare a draft of a permanent Constitution of Pakistan.

I was lucky enough to have witnessed, from a ringside seat in the official gallery in the National Assembly, the passing of the Constitution Bill and the emergence of the 1973 Constitution. It was a momentous event in the chequered history of our country and I was not going to miss it. How could one resist the temptation to be present at Creation? History was in the making.

“History”, writes C V Wedgwood in her biography of William the Silent, “is lived forwards but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never fully recapture what it was to know the beginning only”. None of the main characters in the constitutional drama — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the architect of the Constitution, Abdul Hafeez Pirzada who piloted the Constitution bill and Wali khan who led the Opposition, knew, nor do any of us yet know, the end.

The Constitution committee was particularly conscious of the unfortunate constitutional history of Pakistan and past failures. It identified the causes which led, on more than one occasion, to the breakdown of the constitutional machinery. This, in the opinion of the committee, opened the way for usurpers and dictators to assume power at the cost of the oppressed people and the country. The committee was of the view that the vagueness and dichotomy in the past constitutional instrument with regard to the source and exercise of power enabled unscrupulous adventurers to destroy systematically all democratic institutions and processes.

As the people’s representatives for the first time elected directly by adult franchise, the members of the committee strove to arrive at a constitutional arrangement which would preclude any recurrence of past failures. The draft of the Constitution, the committee hoped, would do away with the dichotomy between the fiction and reality of executive authority. The committee provided what it thought were effective deterrents against any attempt to abrogate or subvert the Constitution, which offense was declared high treason.

I still remember Mr Pirzada thanking the Speaker for conceding the floor to him a