Pakistan - Government
The government is based on the much-amended constitution of 1973, which was suspended twice (in 1977 and 1999) and reinstated twice (in 1985 and 2002). According to the constitution, Pakistan is a federal parliamentary system with a president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government. The legislature, or parliament, is the Majlis-i-Shoora (Council of Advisers), consisting of the Lower House, which is often called the National Assembly, and the Upper House, or Senate. National Assembly members are directly elected for five-year terms. Senate members are elected by provincial assemblies, with equal representation from each of the four provinces as well as representatives from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Islamabad Capital Territory. Both the Senate and National Assembly may initiate and pass legislation, but only the National Assembly can approve federal budgets and finance bills. However, parliament often has had little real political power. For example, in 2003 the only bill passed by the National Assembly was the national budget.
Executive power lies with the prime minister and president. The prime minister is an elected member of the National Assembly and is the leader of the National Assembly’s dominant party or coalition. However, the prime minister also is appointed formally by the president. The prime minister is assisted by a cabinet of ministers who are appointed by the president on the prime minister’s advice. An electoral college composed of members of the national and provincial legislatures elects the president for a five-year term, and no individual may hold the office for more than two consecutive terms. By law the president must be a Muslim. The president acts on the advice of the prime minister but has the power to prevent passage of non-finance bills and may dissolve the National Assembly if he concludes that the government cannot operate according to the constitution. The Senate, however, cannot be suspended.
Pakistan has four provinces — Balochistan, North-West Frontier Province, Punjab, and Sindh — and numerous Federally Administered Areas. Provincial boundaries correspond with areas of numerically dominant linguistic groups, and provinces are divided into a total of 26 divisions that are further subdivided into 101 districts. Federally administered areas include the capital (Islamabad) and 13 Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATAs) as well as the western third of Jammu and Kashmir, although Kashmir’s status is contested by India.
Each province has a governor appointed by the president, and provinces also have an elected legislative assembly and a chief minister who is the leader of the legislative assembly’s majority party or coalition. The chief minister is assisted by a council of ministers chosen by the chief minister and formally approved by the governor. Federally administered areas also have their own legislative entities, which have had less autonomy from the federal government than provincial legislatures. However, tribal areas in the west have traditional legal systems that operate independently of the federal government. Various regimes have promoted local-level Basic Democracies so that communities can have input into federal policy, but these entities have suffered from inconsistent federal government support.
Although provinces and federally administered areas have their own political and administrative institutions, federal government agencies are heavily involved in the affairs of these areas. There are some matters over which both federal and provincial governments can make laws and establish departments for their execution. For example, provincial governments administer agricultural and social services, but the federal government legislates on these matters, and federal agencies also are involved in their administration. Moreover, the federal government has the power to dismiss provincial chief ministers and legislatures.
Politics in Pakistan often have not operated according to the constitution. The military and Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP) frequently have been the preeminent actors in the country’s power structure, and in 1999 General Pervez Musharraf assumed power in a military coup. Moreover, there has been some concern that Pakistan could become a “failed state” because of the apparent inability of any single entity to control the country, the weakened productivity of a population beset by years of economic difficulties, and continuing problems of communal conflict and terrorism. Ethnic and provincial tensions often are manifested in rivalries between political parties, and several governments have been ended by assassination or military coup rather than by formal, electoral change.
Pakistan's political system is broken: its political parties are ineffective, functioning for decades as instruments of two families, the Bhuttos and the Sharifs, two clans, both corrupt. The Bhutto-Zardari axis may be considered "left leaning," while the Sharif brothers may be considered "right leaning." The Sharifs are much closer to Pakistan's military, and to Pakistan's Muslim fundamentalists. Punjabi, the Sharifs represent Pakistan's major ethnic bloc, and the devout Sunni Sharif has an advantage over the Bhuttos, who have Shiite ties.
The concept of the Islamic state has dominated religion-political thinking in Pakistan ever since its creation in 1947. Religion has played an important role in politics, and religious differences have been very salient in Pakistani government and civil tensions of whether and how to synthesize Islamic principles into an essentially secular and Western form of government. Religious differences among politically influential actors have become increasingly prominent since the early 1980s, when politics became more religiously oriented under the rule of General Zia ul-Haq (1977–88). As religious groups’ access to government resources increased, groups competed for political resources and the capacity to promote their approach to Islam, and sectarian divisions often became violent.
Pakistan has had a troubled constitutional history since its very inception as a state. Not long after partition from India in 1947, Pakistan was plunged into a Constitutional crisis in 1954 when the Governor General dissolved the Constituent Assembly when he did not agree to the proposed constitution. This first major subversion of the constitutional process was challenged before the Federal Court, which validated the dissolution of the assembly in the Moulvi Tamizuddin case (1955). Although a new Constituent Assembly adopted the country’s first constitution in 1956, it lasted only two years until the first President of Pakistan, Major-General Iskander Mirza, abrogated the Constitution, dissolved the national and provincial legislatures and imposed Martial Law, appointing General Ayub Khan as the Chief Martial Law Administrator.
In the Dosso case (1958), the Supreme Court of Pakistan validated once again the extra-constitutional actions of the executive and enunciated the doctrine of ‘revolutionary legality.’ After passing a new Constitution in 1962 that empowered an autocratic executive, General Ayub Khan ruled until 1969. He was forced to hand over the reins of power to General Yahya Khan after widespread student protests led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his newly-founded Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP). General Yahya Khan presided over a disastrous military campaign in East Pakistan, Pakistan’s loss to India in the war of 1971, and ultimately the secession of East Pakistan to form Bangladesh.
In 1973 Pakistan adopted its current constitution after thorough deliberation and consensus of all the political parties. The Constitution of Pakistan created a parliamentary form of government following the British model whereby the elected Prime Minister is the locus of executive power and the President is a figurehead. The other key foundational principle of the 1973 Constitution is that of federalism. Pakistan’s four provinces each have their own provincial legislatures. Whereas the seats in the National Assembly, the lower house of the national parliament, are distributed between provinces on a demographic basis, each province is entitled to equal representation in the upper house, the Senate. Constitutional amendments require the approval of two-thirds majorities in both the National Assembly and the Senate.
In 1977, in the aftermath of protests from an alliance of opposition political parties over claims of rigging of the elections, General Zia-ul-Haq deposed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto as Prime Minister and imposed Martial Law in the country, placing the Constitution in abeyance and replacing it in the interim with a Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO). In the Nusrat Bhutto case (1977) the Supreme Court once again validated the coup on the basis of the Common Law “doctrine of state necessity.” Zia then made several changes to the Constitution to strengthen the power of the president, including introducing Article 58(2)(b) to the Constitution via the notorious Eighth Constitutional Amendment. Article 58(2)(b) granted the President discretionary powers to dismiss the Parliament and call for fresh elections.
In the 1988 elections Benazir Bhutto led the PPP to victory and became the first Prime Minister after the Zia era, ushering in a decade of alternation between the elected governments of Bhutto’s PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) led by Mian Nawaz Sharif. The military interfered several times in politics and backed presidential use of Article 58(2) (b) to dissolve the government, usually justifying its actions based on corruption charges against the political leaders.
In August 2008, General Musharraf resigned as President amidst a threat of impeachment by the legislators. With the subsequent election of Asif Ali Zardari, chairman of the PPP, as President of Pakistan the ruling coalition’s interest in renegotiating the shift back to a more parliamentary structure of governance appears to have dwindled.
