CCI reactivation, at last

The government announcement last Thursday that President General Pervez Musharraf has reconstituted the Council of Common Interest (CCI), to say the least, is a long overdue step in the right direction. Headed by the Prime Minister, the Council is to comprise the four chief ministers, three federal ministers, one each from Sindh, Balochistan and the NWFP - while the prime minister who is an MNA from Attock will represent Punjab.
Briefing journalists on the subject, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz showed a lot of enthusiasm and support for the CCI. Its reconstitution under Article 153 of the Constitution, he said, is a major development towards resolving matters contained in part II of the Federal Legislative List as well as the Concurrent List, and further it would promote harmony between the Centre and the federating units.
It is pertinent to mention here that one of the points on the agenda General Musharraf had presented in his very first address to the nation, immediately after taking over power, was to decrease inter-provincial disharmony that was eating into the foundations of the federation.
Yet for more than five years on, the most important constitutional forum for achieving that objective, the CCI, remained virtually moribund until, in its recent landmark judgement in the Steel Mills privatisation case, the Supreme Court directed the government to reactivate it within six weeks.
In the meantime, a number of issues have continued to hang fire, aggravating old issues and generating new ones involving disputes between the federation and the provinces besides those between the provinces. To name a few, Balochistan is up in arms against the federation on what its leaders perceive as unfair treatment at the hands of the federal government in denying the province its fair share of royalties from its gas and other natural resources.
Sindh and NWFP have been offering stiff resistance to the government plans to build big dams, particularly the Kalabagh dam, while the latter has also locked horns with the Centre regarding royalty from power generation projects. Equally contentious is the issue of water distribution that has thwarted all progress towards increasing the hydel power generation capacity of the country.
During the last couple of years the federal government leaders, including the President himself, have tried to address the suspicions and mistrust of the smaller provinces on one or the other issue, but with little success.
When there is so much resistance to a given project as is the case in several instances, the time-tested method of finding an amicable solution is for the disputants to sit around a table and sort out their grievances, whether real or imagined.
On the contrary, an atmosphere of estrangement was, in fact, created, as it was increasingly felt in the course of the Steel Mills case that provinces stood completely sidelined in so far as the privatisation of state-owned enterprises was concerned. They were only consulted to satisfy the procedural requirements, otherwise they had very little say and absolutely no role in the shaping of the privatisation policy or for that matter its implementation.
Surely, it was in view of situations where it is impossible to physically separate inter-provincial sectors like the railways, water from the rivers that originate in Kashmir and flow through the NWFP and Punjab into Sindh, the national electrical grids drawing electricity from dams on these rivers, etc, that the framers of the Constitution had provided for a specific forum, CCI, so that representatives of the federating units and the Centre could settle contentious questions through the age old method of debate and discussion.
According to the Prime Minister, "the President would soon convene a meeting of the CCI and consult with other members to see what issues could be considered." While it is heartening to hear that a reactivated CCI is to meet soon, it also needs to be ensured that it meets regularly, for resolving, on a continual basis, whenever and wherever any issues of inter-provincial disharmony and mistrust raise their ugly head.