Playing with fire.

Byline: I.A. Rehman

THE establishment's assault on the 18th Amendment and the NFC Award is not a matter of recent origin. It is the result of the ruling elite's search over a considerably long time for a strategy to revive the highly centralised polity that authoritarian rulers, civil as well as military, in the past promoted and which was consistently opposed by democratic opinion.

The official spokesmen argue the 18th Amendment is not a revealed document that cannot be touched. Nobody has claimed to the contrary. Indeed, the Constitution as a whole is not a sacrosanct document. At best, it represents a consensus that cannot be trifled with by whim and caprice. The same is true about the 18th Amendment.

The significance of this amendment lies in the fact that it represents the first attempt at establishing a federation that Pakistan was supposed to be from the day the Lahore resolution was adopted. Consensus on the amendment was a compromise between federalists and advocates of a strong centre. Besides, the inheritors of Gen Zia's mantle and the religio-political parties saw to it that all Zia's interpolations were not repealed. The many opinions expressed by members of the parliamentary committee are on record.

Any attempt to strengthen the federal character of the state should be welcomed.

Thus any attempt to strengthen the federal character of the state should be welcomed by every democrat worth his salt. But that is not what the present denigrators of the 18th Amendment want. They want to deprive the federating units of administrative and financial gains, especially the latter, accruing to them under this amendment and the decade-old NFC award. This they consider necessary to reviving the pre-2010 all-powerful centre.

The establishment's point of view was vaguely put by Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi when he said that the provinces would have to sit down with the federation to review their relationship. Another important minister, Asad Umar, made two points. Firstly, he claimed everybody had realised that if the federation was weakened the provinces too would lose, meaning thereby that the provinces needed to revive the strong centre in their own interest. Secondly, he argued that the 18th Amendment needed to be reviewed to make up for its failure to carry the decentralisation process from the provinces to local bodies. To many, this line of argument will appear an echo of Ayub Khan's rhetoric in praise of a strong centre...