Daily Times Editorial April 9, 2010

The ‘impossible’ comes to pass

In a rare show of unanimity, the National Assembly passed the 18th Amendment Bill with 292 votes, more than the two-thirds majority required. The Bill will now go to the Senate for ratification, and if passed in the Upper House by a two-thirds majority too, will become part of the amended constitution. The Bill seeks to scrub the constitution clean of all the distortions introduced by military dictators and return the basic law to conformity with parliamentary norms. Out of the 272 Articles of the constitution, 102 have been amended by the mammoth exercise conducted by the Constitutional Reforms Committee (CRC) under Senator Raza Rabbani.
Some of the notable changes made in the basic law of the land are: the aberration of General Ziaul Haq’s name being part of the constitution has been done away with; Article 58(2)(b) has been repealed, taking away the president’s power to dissolve the assemblies; NWFP province has been renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa; Musharraf’s 17th Amendment and the Legal Framework Order have been repealed and declared unlawful; the concurrent list stands abolished; the ban on a third term for prime ministers and chief ministers has been lifted; suspension or holding of the constitution in abeyance has been declared high treason; the Council of Common Interests has been reconstituted with the prime minister as its chairman and the stipulation that it must meet at least once in 90 days; the superior judges’ appointments procedure has been amended through the setting up of a judicial commission that will recommend and a parliamentary commission that will finalise the names of judges; the chief election commissioner’s appointment procedure will now entail a consensus between the treasury and the opposition; services chiefs will henceforth be appointed by the chief executive, the prime minister, although the president will remain supreme commander of the armed forces; an Islamabad High Court and benches of the Peshawar High Court in Mingora and the Balochistan High Court in Turbat respectively have been proposed; the provinces will have joint control with the federal government over their natural resources.
A mere listing of these provisions indicates how wide ranging and thorough have been the labours of the CRC. It virtually reads like a capsule history of the country viewed through the prism of its problems, the damage done by military dictators, and giving voice to the aspirations of federating units as well as the citizen.
The Bill was passed unanimously, but not before dissent was heard in the house, as well as outside it after its passage. On the floor of the house, the loudest dissent came from the PML-Q. Although all its proposed amendments to the amendment were rejected, it decided to go along with the consensus of the house and did not carry out its earlier threat to vote against the Bill. However, it is keeping its powder dry for proposing the same amendments relating to the renaming of NWFP, internal party elections, retention of the concurrent list and women’s seats when the Senate debates the Bill. On the street, the Seraiki, Sindhi and Baloch nationalists expressed reservations and even rejection of the 18th Amendment for not giving sufficient provincial autonomy, although in Balochistan at least, this was not a unanimous view in the nationalist camp.
Nevertheless, the passing of the 18th Amendment has been widely welcomed across the board by political forces as well as the people. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, immeasurably and rightly empowered by the Amendment’s provisions, put its success down to the politics of reconciliation his party has been adhering to in line with the philosophy and thoughts of their slain leader, Benazir Bhutto.
We must await the fate of the Amendment in the Senate, although the chances are it will sail through, if not unanimously, at least with sufficient votes. History is being made before our eyes. We must all now rise to the challenges of carrying democracy and service to the people to their logical ends.