The writer is a freelance columnist.
The writer is a freelance columnist.

KHURRAM Husain’s excellent piece on these pages provided some much-needed clarity on the forced renewal of a debate around the 18th Amendment and the National Finance Commission (NFC) award. As pointed out by him and others, in the absence of a refutation from ISPR, there is little reason to doubt the attributed scepticism on devolution and fiscal federalism.

Ultimately, the debate’s turf boils down, as it has in some form or the other for the last 70 years, to a crass gun versus butter trade-off. This is made all the more salient by the fiscal squeeze applied by worsening relations with the US and the tapering off of military aid. In short, the pie at the centre has shrunk but the appetite continues to grow.

I am not interested in engaging in a moral lesson around who is allowed to say or pontificate on what based on constitutional protocols. That debate is redundant and tiresome and refuses to show any meaningful progress.

The argument in favour of devolution is that it helps resolve the basic question of how power and authority are exercised among different stakeholders.

Instead, it is worth opening up a more substantive policy debate on the issue of federalism in light of Pakistan’s political and economic history. While the ahistorical military mind dreams about an all-conquering, all-powerful centre, civilian politicians, other policymakers, and academics are expected to articulate clear justifications for why other institutional models of governance are worth pursuing.

The case for the 18th Amendment is particularly salient from the lens of what works in and for a multi-ethnic ‘mobilised’ society. The key here is the second attribute — ie the mobilisation of ethnic or provincial identity. Societies can have a range of dormant cleavages, but it is the active cleavages or fractures that determine politics. People mobilising around the issue of linguistic rights will push discourse and negotiation in that direction. Conversely, mobilisation around class identity and inequality will produce different outcomes.

Pakistan’s political history, and especially its historical inheritance from colonialism, is one of provincial and ethnic mobilisation. Provinces were the battleground on which a negotiated independence from the British was ultimately won. They were the arenas that were opened up for electoral politics, much before any national elections took place in the subcontinent.

In the post-independence phase, Pakistan’s party politics in the early 1950s, mapped onto provincial lines, a politics of dissent emerged against the unitary agenda of the One Unit scheme, and the debate on provincial autonomy was an important (if not the most important) debate in early state-building. That debate was resolved temporarily in 1973, and subsequently more comprehensively in 2010.

Devolution to the provinces is neither a divine right, nor an unequivocal positive in every situation. The argument in its favour in Pakistan is simply that it helps resolve the basic question of how power and authority are exercised among different stakeholders (parties, voting coalitions, ethnic groups) in a stable and consensual, or at a bare minimum, least disruptive manner. And to argue that it has not helped on this front would be empirically incorrect.

Firstly, granting provincial autonomy has not enabled centrifugal forces to take root. If anything, it has done the exact opposite. Three of the four provinces are currently led by parties that are competing at the federal level, even if their presence in other provinces is limited. None are content with winning just one province, and no major stakeholder is advocating secessionism. If anything, there are more centripetal political forces now in Pakistan than at any point in the past.

Secondly, the various forms of power-sharing between the centre and the provinces have realigned incentives in a way that clear-cut conflicts over resources and resource-based rights are far less destabilising. At several points over the last eight years, decision-makers have arrived at fairly amicable solutions (such as on hydel profits and natural gas royalties) to what were previously very thorny issues.

Third, a repeated critique of devolution has been the lack of capacity in the provinces to deliver on a range of service delivery and regulatory issues. This particular line of questioning is mystifying because it’s not like the centre has been a paragon of competence over the last 70 years. If anything, recent years show the provinces demonstrating greater appetite for governance-based innovation, whether it’s through new mechanisms for service delivery, making greater outlays on social sectors (education spending for example has gone up by 300 per cent in the last five years), introducing new models of financing for infrastructure projects, or gradually making use of new fiscal instruments, such as the sales tax on services.

Finally, the fiscal space granted to the provinces post-18th Amendment has allowed at least one major party — the PTI — to experiment with more empowered local governments. Given that this change is led by a political party, it has the potential of being less prone to complete reversal and roll-back, unlike previous episodes of devolution. It can be hypothesised that the pressures for service delivery, and the internal exigencies of maintaining party stability, given lots of competing workers and elites, will eventually push other parties to do the same.

The 18th Amendment and the seventh NFC award are by no means the last word on the country’s political system. Once the nature of underlying politics and rights-based grievances changes, it is possible that some re-centralisation might be of greater utility.

Similarly, the issue of weakening federal government finances given debt-servicing, pension costs, and military spending requires some creative thinking. The centre now has a coordination role in development — given four provinces, issues of inequity, and CPEC — and thus requires new kinds of spending powers and capacity. But it is crucial that these conversations are contextualised by the nuances and historical contingencies laid out above. Letting them operate on the simplistic, intellectually inadequate turf being set up by the security establishment is a recipe for long-term disaster.

The writer is a freelance columnist.
umairjaved@lumsalumni.pk
Twitter: @umairjav

Published in Dawn, March 26th, 2018

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