IN 1970 BALOCHISTAN was declared a Governor’s province and with the dissolution of the One Unit the borders and boundaries were restored for Sindh, Punjab and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to what they had been under the Government of India Act 1935.
Following the secession of Bangladesh in 1971 there was a distinct desire to invigorate this federalism in design and spirit to a more authentic and organic union between the remaining provincial units.
In the making of the 1973 Constitution certain vestiges of highly-centralised control and oversight, such as had been the hallmark of the One Unit plan, were done away with. Additionally, whereas the counter-majoritarianism of the first two decades was oriented to the maintenance of parity between East and West,1 in this design, the principle was employed to bolster the representation of interests by the smaller provinces.This chapter begins with a look at the political structure of federalism, including provincial representation at the level of the federal government, the structure of provincial governments and the system of rule for non-provincial territorial entities as provided in the 1973 Constitution. Following that are three further sections: the first looks [386] at the division of legislative and executive powers between provinces and the federation; the second investigates two instances of continuing ethnic conflict in Pakistan and their relation to the formal structures of federalism; the last looks at the constitutional guarantee of local government introduced in 2010 and the extent of its realisation.
Issues related to federalism have in many ways been the bane of statecraft in Pakistan. The federal formula contrived in 1973 has eventually been considered a failure by all of the federating units other than the Punjab. Owing partly to the centralising imperative of recurrent and lengthy military rule, the devolution promised in 1973 was never realised. In 2010 a package of far-reaching reforms in the Eighteenth Amendment Act received unanimous assent in the National Assembly and a range of provisions aimed at eroding both legislative and executive centralisation were incorporated into the Constitution. Importantly, the package also renamed the NWFP as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). In each part of this chapter, an attempt is made to mark the changes introduced by the Eighteenth Amendment and to gauge their impact thus far.
I.