EDITORIAL: For a while, trial balloons are being floated about a possible change in the country’s political system from parliamentary to presidential form of government. The ruling PTI is now reported to have started a hush-hush campaign towards that end with the support of its allied parties.
Prime Minister Imran Khan unhappy with constraints on implementation of his plans and policies under the present system wants to pursue the ideas to make the decision-making process easier for himself. That requires major constitutional changes with a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament. Hence, he is said to have tasked some of his party leaders to engage with the PPP.
The party has been opposed to any such suggestion in the past, and is likely to remain so in view of the fact that its founding leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s abiding legacy that no one has been able to challenge for practical purposes is the consensus 1973 Constitution that provides for parliamentary form of government.
Indeed, there are merits in either system. The presidential form of government is prospering in several democracies. In this country also it has been tried before, though, each time with disastrous consequences.
Four years after taking over power in a coup, the first military ruler Gen Ayub Khan introduced the 1962 constitution that espoused a presidential form of government to become an executive president, and sowed the seeds of an increasing sense of alienation in the country’s eastern wing, which ultimately led to the secession of East Pakistan under his successor, President Gen Yahya Khan. For a brief period, the country moved on the road to socio-economic progress and political stability when popularly elected PPP leader Bhutto assumed the prime minister’s office. Ousting him another general, Ziaul Haq, thrust himself into power as president.
He not only involved the country in the US’s proxy war in Afghanistan for which the country paid a heavy price in the form of gun and heroin culture and radicalisation of many young people, but also instituted several retrogressive measures with lasting ramifications for this state and society.
In 1999, another general, Pervez Musharraf, overthrew yet again a democratically elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and installed himself as president. Aside from involving the country in another external conflict, he triggered a protracted insurgency in Balochistan, and also created widespread political unrest. That part of this country’s unsavoury history, though, has nothing to do with benefits or lack of them in that form of government since all the aforementioned presidents ruled exercising power of the gun rather than people’s mandate.
But, it is worth noting that when the people’s representatives got a chance to frame the constitution, as in 1956 and ‘73, they gave preference to parliamentary system over the presidential form of government. They saw wisdom in it because despite its din and bustle the former offers advantages above the latter system of democratic governance as the prime minister is accountable, on a continual basis, before the public representatives in Parliament.
The PTI also would be well-advised to get over its desire to evade pressures that it feels curb its freedom to do whatever it deems necessary (in any event, it is a losing proposition) and let the present system flourish.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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