ISLAMABAD, Sept 20: A seminar on the problems and politics of federalism in Pakistan which opened here on Tuesday produced more heat than hopes for a true federal system taking root in the country. In his speech prepared for the two-day seminar Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz assured that his government and President Gen Pervez Musharraf both were alive to the issue.
Since the premier was preoccupied elsewhere, his speech was read out by a junior cabinet minister.
Prime Minister Aziz said his government “will very soon take up the issue of fiscal and administrative decentralization” to the provinces.
“A federation is unthinkable without strong federating units,” he said, stressing that as more powers and responsibilities were transferred from the provinces to the district governments the federation of Pakistan would be strengthened.
“It is wrong to say that the Devolution of Power Plan undermines provincial autonomy,” the prime minister asserted.
But the speakers who followed him sounded quite skeptical as they recalled the bitter constitutional and political experiences of the past which saw the majority province secede as Bangladesh.
Well-known political analyst Prof Hasan Askari Rizvi speaking on the ‘conceptual and practical issues of federalism’ observed that Pakistan fulfils the minimum requirements of federalism but the problem arises at the operational level.
“Both the military and civilian rulers have undermined the spirit of federalism in Pakistan by concentrating powers in the federal government at the expense of the provinces,” he said.
Who exercises — or is recruited to exercise — power and how the resources are shared determines the fate the federation, he said. “As the system of centre-province relations did not grow over time in an uninterrupted manner, federalism, like other institutions, stifled over time,” he noted.
Many speakers after him emphasized the point that a federation would work only if the people of its units actually experienced good coming from it to them.
Prof Khalid Mahmud of the Institute for Regional Studies said the Indians decided within three years the shape of federalism in their country after gaining independence while Pakistan was kept bogged down in a constitutional impasse for nine years which gave rise to forces that eventually wrecked the democratic system.
“A civil-military bureaucratic oligarchy was instrumental in making and unmaking the governments,” he recalled.
In the former East Pakistan, the so-called provincial autonomy was turned into a joke when the United Front, which had won 300 of the 310 seats in the provincial elections of 1954, was not allowed to stay in power more than a couple of months, he said.
Gen Ayub Khan’s coup and ‘controlled democracy’ dealt a death blow to whatever pretence of ‘autonomous provinces constituting a federation’ the country’s ruling elite, called by some critics as ‘Punjabi-Mohajir Mafia’, had sought to create under the flawed 1956 Constitution, Prof Mahmud said.
The precedence of a federal law over a provincial law was explicitly stated in the 1956 Constitution.
Similarly, the 1973 Constitution consensus document “did not deter Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from making a mockery of provincial rights in the name of national interest” as he dismissed the opposition governments in Balochistan and NWFP.
“Pakistan’s ruling elite, whether army generals or elected politicians, had always held a brief for a ‘strong centre’, and Mr Bhutto was no exception,” he said.
Prof Mahmud said Pakhtun nationalism has “run out of steam” as the Pathans “have fully exploited the economic opportunities offered to them by the open national market and have become politically influential in their newly adopted hometowns”.
Sindhi nationalism had more potential to take on the ‘Punjab- dominated’ Centre but its confrontation with the Mohajir Qaumi Movement and the Pakistan People’s Party weakened it, he said.
But Baloch nationalist groups have reappeared, some demanding a new constitution to guarantee maximum autonomy while others engaging in acts of violence and subversion.
In his view “the only course to avoid a confrontation scenario in Balochistan is to opt for a negotiated settlement with those who actually call the shots — the Baloch Sardars”.
Dr Mansoor Akbar Kundi of Balochistan University agreed that what he called “crisis of penetration” had been worsening in his adopted province, but said the present government’s “development strategy” was bringing welcome change.
“Except for three or four, all sardars are with the government on development,” he said, reminding that the sardars held sway over 25 per cent area only of Balochistan while there was no resistance to development in the rest of the province.
Dr Kundi said Balochistan, the largest gas producer in the country, is believed to lose huge amounts every year of its share in gas development surcharge and the royalty. Balochis demand a raise in both the surcharge and the royalty, he said.
A former chief secretary of NWFP, Mr Khalid Aziz, presenting the case of his province revealed that incidence of poverty in NWFP at 38.5 per cent was higher than the national average of 30.5 per cent, and the GDP of the province as percentage of Pakistan GDP dropped from 11.8 per cent in 1998 to 9.9 per cent in 2004.
However NWFP was better off than the rest of the country in electricity consumption and primary education and hospital facilities.
Mr Aziz highlighted the tussle between the NWFP and the Centre over the “net profits on hydel (power)”. The GoP paid the province only Rs72 billion of the Rs268 billion due on the account between 1973 and 2003, leaving Rs196 in arrears.
NWFP’s hydel profits have tumbled from 23 per cent in 1998 to 14 per cent in 2004 and federal transfers to it from 87 per cent of its total revenue to 85 per cent during the same period, he said.
A participant surprised the seminar by disclosing that an arbitration agreement reached between the GoP and the NWFP after two years of negotiations has been lying at the prime minister’s desk for the past three months because the federal government “does not want the (opposition) MMA government in NWFP look good” by approving it.
Mr Aziz added to the drama by disclosing that the power house of the Ghazi Barotha Hydel Project downstream Tarbela was shifted to Mianwali in Punjab because its original site in NWFP would have entitled that province royalties.
Sindh Education Minister Dr Hamida Khuro took issue with the subject given to her to speak on: “Parameters of Provincial Autonomy - View from Sindh Rural”.
“There was a time when the interests of urban Sindh were seen as being different from those of the rural. The political representatives of urban Sindh saw their interests lying with a strong Centre (but) the events of last 30 years changed those circumstances drastically. By the end of 1990s the major faction of MQM had declared itself a non-ethnic party. The politics of Sindh therefore are no longer revolving around ethnic groups,” she declared.
Dr Khuro said the provisions of the constitution regarding federal relations had “massively eroded” provincial autonomy. “Power of governance resides truly with the central bureaucrats. The provincial governments and indeed the newly inducted local governments are merely eyewash,” she asserted.
Sindh today is demanding that the basis of National Finance Commission Award should be “backwardness, need, population but also the amount of contribution that a province was making to the federal financial cake”, she said, alluding to the fact that bulk of federal revenues is generated in Sindh.
Dr Khuro was also critical of the distribution of river waters.
“As a lower reparian, river water is a major problem for Sindh. The people see the shortages as a centrally imposed injustice on the province. It feels that the Punjab is favoured heavily as the Punjabi presence in the federal bureaucracy is ensuring that its interests are favoured above others,” she said.