TODAY, the country’s hybrid government is fixated on altering Pakistan’s constitutionally mandated provincial structure and multiplying administrative units. To sell the idea, establishment apologists have rolled out some disingenuous arguments. They claim this will improve governance and miraculously solve the country’s problems overnight.

A debate has been generated in the media about the pros and cons of administrative changes and breaking provinces into more units. Parliament has yet to discuss this. That is unsurprising. Deliberation is not this legislature’s strong suit. It has rushed through constitutional amendments in record time, once in the dead of night and without meaningful debate. Meanwhile, speculation is mounting that another constitutional amendment is being prepared to push through ‘administrative changes’.

Absent from the establishment’s consideration of these sweeping changes are lessons from Pakistan’s history. Over the decades, the country’s rulers have experimented with parliamentary, presidential, semi-presidential, quasi-parliamentary systems, direct military rule, and more recently a hybrid model, which involves informal power-sharing between the military and civilians, with the former as dominant partner. Pakistan has tried them all. Yet each switch only contributed to political instability. The only system to command legitimacy and broad support is parliamentary democracy, despite the fact that parliamentary supremacy over the executive has never been realised.

Linked to these experiments has been the status and rights of provinces in a federal system. As the provincial configuration and federating units largely coincided with the ethnic composition of people of each province, the need was always........

© Dawn