The unseemly haste and unjustified secrecy created a disastrous situation.
LAHORE: As the story goes, a Sikh ruler was informed that too many crime cases were pending, leading to inordinate delays. He ordered all cases to be placed before him in two equal piles. Without any discussion, he ordered, “The accused in the cases on the right are acquitted, while those on the left are convicted.”
The parliamentary committee on the 18th Amendment passed a similar judgment on the Concurrent List. Instead of considering the items in the list one by one, it threw, in one sweep, the entire list in the lap of the provinces, in total disregard of the harmful consequences of such a decision. The unseemly haste and unjustified secrecy created a disastrous situation. Since the proceedings were behind closed doors, there could not be a public debate in the media.
A vague verbal promise, no doubt, was made in the National Assembly that the Concurrent List would be abolished 10 years after the adoption of the Constitution but nothing was in writing. Meanwhile, many developments occurred in the decades since 1973 and there were also practical considerations that did not allow the transfer of certain federal subjects.
After months of analysis and item-by-item discussions, the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) listed the subjects that the Federation should retain. Its recommendations were submitted to the then president Pervez Musharraf a few months before the general elections in 2002. The end-result was that many subjects that the provinces could not deal with were transferred to them. The attempt to abolish the Higher Education Commission was only a harbinger of what is to come.
A wiser course would have been to get a copy of the recommendations of the NRB and adopt them, with modifications, if necessary. Instead, parliament transferred arbitrarily the entire Concurrent List to provinces without due consideration or public debate.
Muhammad Abd alHameed
Published in The Express Tribune, July 11th, 2011.
