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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.
This is exactly the situation that the 18th Amendment and its associated NFC award anticipated. That is why the provinces were strengthened and endowed with ample resources. The idea was to build little fortresses around the country into which civilian, democratically based power centres could retreat when the inevitable reassertion of non-democratic power came. That moment is now upon us, and the interior minister’s words suggesting that the “system has collapsed” and perhaps a new federal structure is needed are the first major growl of non-democratic forces against these fortresses.
The contest is now on. Underlying the whole affair is the struggle over resources and who gets how much. Since July 2023, Pakistan has been stuck in a gruelling economic stabilisation programme that has choked off growth and placed a heavy burden on the citizenry and owners of capital, just so the state could rebuild its fiscal and foreign exchange buffers. Those buffers have not been rebuilt — not even close. The State Bank hinted that it would have reached its reserve target by December, implying that from that point onwards the foreign exchange flowing into the country would be available to help finance private sector activity rather than being used for reserve building purposes. The announcement by the government of two subsidised credit schemes, at least one of which appears to directly breach commitments given to the IMF, is another indication that the gears are now shifting away from stabilisation and towards growth.
Underlying the whole affair is the struggle over resources and who gets how much.
So here’s what has happened. The political parties were allowed to own the hard part — stabilisation. But now that the gears are shifting towards growth, now that the party is set to begin and the hard work of the previous three years to bear fruit, there are rumblings of discontent rising from the depths of the state. It seems they want to keep the good times to themselves. First, they sought to find creative ways to roll back NFC allocations, and a compromise was reached in which the funds demanded by the centre were made available to them from provincial coffers without any modifications to the NFC formula. Now it seems more demands have arisen.
It won’t work though. Redrawing the federation is too large an enterprise to pull off without violating the Constitution, and the DG ISPR was clear that violating the Constitution is a “red line” that nobody should cross. That statement will remain operative until a new one. So until then it seems the instability rippling through the system will remain confined to verbal duelling between proxy voices. But notice has been served.
Underlying all this is the same question that has underlain all civil-military politics in Pakistan: resources. The game revolves around who controls the material resources of the state, and what purpose these resources are directed towards. One side has told us what they want: a ‘hard state’, meaning a state in which security of the realm is the foremost objective and no obstacle is allowed to stand in its way. It is in this vein that the interior minister, who has been aptly described by the defence minister as being both in and out of the cabinet at the same time, was able to express his views on how the ‘system has collapsed’ at an event hosted by a business lobbying group, during which he also gently criticised the prime minister’s laptop scheme. It is worth noting that the same minister distributed laptops among students at the Quaid-i-Azam University under the same scheme in January this year, while the Punjab chief minister ran her own laptop distribution scheme for students.
In all this, the other side wants to buy back the Punjab voter, and hold on to the bases of their power in the meantime. This is taking state resources, and by mentioning the laptop scheme, the interior minister specifically targeted those schemes that are designed to help the ruling party in Punjab re-establish their connection with the voters they fear they have lost since 2017. Schemes such as these, and megaprojects, are exactly how the PML-N had built its relationship with the Punjab voter in the 1990s.
It does not yet look like the set-up will change much in the near future. There is still plenty of room for politics to keep matters afloat. But stabilisation has ended, and with growth set to resume, some changes are being sought.
The writer is a business and economy journalist.
Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2026
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