Constitution Day reflections
April 10 is marked for some years now as Constitution Day in commemoration of the adoption of the 1973 Constitution on that day 45 years ago. The Senate held a discussion on the issue on the day. The Senators voiced the opinion that unity amongst the political parties was the need of the hour to preserve the Constitution and democracy and ensure the supremacy of parliament. On all three counts, Pakistan can best be described as having a chequered record. Former Senate chairman Raza Rabbani raised some probing questions. First and foremost, he delivered a warning to the PML-N government nearing the end of its tenure not be in such a hurry to pass the budget for a whole year since this would become a Damocles sword over the party’s head since the caretaker government, which otherwise can only pass a budget for its four month tenure, would be financially empowered to stay in office longer. Rabbani pointed to the fractionalisation of the political parties to pave the way for engineered elections through ‘test-tube babies’, the encouragement of regional parties and the talk about rolling back the 18th Amendment as factors that may weaken the federation. He wondered why accountability was only reserved for the political class. He noted that the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement was being dubbed anti-Pakistan in line with past practices of labelling those who spoke against the governance of the state or demanded their rights as traitors and ‘disappearing’ them. He also underlined that the near-consensus 1973 Constitution’s sanctity could not be maintained from day one. Thirteen different forms of government had been tried since, including dictatorships, abolition or suspension of the Constitution, presidential systems, technocratic governments, centralisation of government, non-party elections and the devolution plan of Musharraf. In this sorry history, Rabbani reminded us, the judiciary gave military dictators permission to amend the Constitution, elections were manipulated and hung parliaments produced. Currently he was fearful of the impending clash of institutions. Senator Mushahid Hussain pointed to the tragic consequences of losing half the country because the mandate of the 1970 elections was not respected. Senator Hasil Bizenjo complained that political parties were not allowed to work for decades in the country’s history. Zia held non-party polls while Musharraf introduced the graduation clause to be elected to parliament. Parliament’s powers were frequently restricted by dictators. He called on the parties to sign a charter of democracy that forbade them from conspiring against each other in collusion with some state institution, otherwise parliament and democracy were both threatened.
The wisdom of the Senators is confirmed by our history. It took the Constituent Assembly nine years after independence to produce the first Constitution in 1956, flawed as it was in denial of the democratic principle of one man one vote and parity between the two wings with the west wing’s provinces absorbed into One Unit. This construct was overtaken by Ayub’s 1962 Constitution, which retained parity and One Unit but introduced the Basic Democracies system. That presidential construct too did not outlive the Ayub regime and his successor Yahya undid One Unit and introduced one man one vote. As Mushahid pointed out, the failure to respect the mandate of the 1970 elections tore the country asunder and left us holding only half the country. The 1973 Constitution can be dubbed a ‘near-consensus’ one since the four MNAs from Balochistan did not endorse it for lacking satisfactory provisions for provincial autonomy and one other MNA for reasons of political differences with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The opting out by the Balochistan MNAs proved to have profound effects, with fundamental rights suspended the day after the 1973 Constitution was promulgated on August 14, 1973 and a military crackdown launched in Balochistan that later spread to NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). Bhutto himself introduced amendments in the Constitution that eroded its democratic character, while Zia, despite disrespecting the basic law of the land, changed its character radically in the direction of so-called Islamisation. This Constitution thus cried out for cleansing of the distortions and anomalies introduced into it over the years. That provided the foundation and raison d’etre for the 18th Amendment, although it too failed to purge the Constitution of the Zia-introduced Articles 62 and 63, which have found a new notoriety of late. It goes without saying that the Constitution is the basic law that lays down the rules of the political game, without which a democratic parliamentary system cannot function, let alone acquire firm roots. Whereas dictators and others have ridden roughshod over the Constitution for their own vested interests, the politicians too bear their share of responsibility for not prioritising, whenever the opportunity presents itself, strengthening parliament and a democratic culture to keep the shadows of authoritarianism that has wreaked such havoc in our history at bay. Now that a period of uncertainty confronts us in the run up to the coming general elections, the political class needs to refresh its memory of our travails of the past and commit to struggling for the letter and spirit of a democratic order with a supreme parliament at its head.
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