I agree in part, but I look to frame things a little differently and look beyond party politics and face value governance issues.
The core of our problems IMO is a lack of democratic power, and a paraplegic political system. What do I mean by this? Basically democracy is meant to be a system run directly or representatively in accordance with the wishes of the
demos; the people are calling the shots for their own benefit. This system works best when mob rule is checked by representative democracy and balancing of power, election rather than sortition, and then you have layers of abstraction of legislative authority between different bodies such the senate, assembly, courts upholding a constitution, assembly checking process of courts, executive checked by a sovereign parliament with some powers of its own. This system is a basis that has been undermined in Pakistan by dictators and opportunistic politicians, even judges in their admirable effort to uphold judicial sovereignty in the lawyers movement ended up going too far and leaving themselves no checks and balances on their own authority. When you combine a dysfunctional and poorly representative system that has lots of internal weakness and a history of being bent to the will of the strongest, and an economy where entrenched interests practise cronyism and feudalism to bolster their power through their wealth which in turns boosters their wealth through their power. You get a system like ours, unable to move on important issues, farcical levels of power accorded to weak governments, dictators and their saplings run amok.
We are complaining about corruption, poverty, poor management. But there’s no fix for these things if the political system is rotten and designed to produce either power struggles that overstep boundaries or produce rotten results directly.
IMO Pakistan needs these things established in roughly this order:
- A broad political consensus on changing the system or at least tweaking it in very meaningful ways. Get every stakeholder onboard and make all proceedings public and open to scrutiny.
- A big reaffirmation of constitutional law, some amendment can be made with a broad consensus.
- Parliamentary sovereignty rubber stamped, and the accountability of certain other arms of government brought back directly under government control and answerable to the assembly.
- Electoral reform, current system means that parties like PTI or national parties lose, regional parties with heartlands like PML and PPP win and this both skews the parliamentary arithmetic, it also leads to regional division. And a simple fact, it shouldn’t be the case that if Punjab alone votes PMLN that the whole of Pakistan is then held to that by arithmetic.
- I’d suggest replacing first past the post with a German style proportional system, this will force our politics to mature and prevent regional parties forming majorities with just 30-35% of the vote as is the case now.
- Accountability of the army, they can’t be above the law, they are above it and have run roughshod over everything, scrutiny, transparency and oversight is needed.
- Media freedom needs to be reaffirmed and freedom of association, this has been undermined.
- Provinces need to be broken up into smaller administrative units. E.g places like Karachi shouldn’t be tied against their will to a government at the Sindh level. This means expanding and changing 18th amendment. You wanted devolution? Let’s have it then.
- Then we can talk about structural reforms a few years down the line, starting with land and agriculture. Do what’s been missing for decades, SC should be asked not to bar it citing a plethora of good reasons.
- Judicial accountability is needed. I’m very happy that our judiciary is no longer in the sorry state it was during dictatorship, but the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Some more transparency and parliamentary oversight on the appointment of judges is needed
These are all really hard to achieve, but we need them in order to move forward, no work done at the top levels of the current system can deal with the huge challenges Pakistan faces until the ground underneath is solidified. The system needs to be changed to make the country governable while also rebalancing power, back into the hands of people. Sorry for the long essay, some of it needs to be addressed as a priority before moving on to other matters.