Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s declaration of the “collapse” of the country’s existing governance system, and call for new provinces or “administrative units,” unveils the foundation of yet another grand national experiment in a country whose history is no stranger to numerous past attempts.
Speaking at the Pakistan Economic Summit, the sitting minister argued that governance could only improve through administrative reforms backed by political consensus and public support.
In theory, there is nothing inherently controversial about such administrative reforms. Many countries periodically redraw internal boundaries to improve governance. Pakistan itself has long debated the creation of a South Punjab province and other administrative changes. The controversy lies elsewhere.
Naqvi is neither the leader of a political party contesting elections nor is he officially part of any existing political party. Nonetheless, he occupies one of the country’s most powerful ministries despite remaining outside conventional electoral politics, pointing to the institutional support that has brought him to this post. When such a figure publicly declares that the existing system has failed, it inevitably raises questions about what organ of the state is seeking the latest restructuring.
History provides ample reason for caution.
Pakistan’s first great constitutional experiment came with the One Unit scheme in 1955, which merged the entire western wing into a single province to balance East Pakistan. Marketed as administrative efficiency, it instead concentrated power, deepened provincial grievances and collapsed before its ultimate abolishment in 1970.
The following decades saw an almost uninterrupted succession of institutional redesigns. General Ayub Khan’s martial law (1958-1969) replaced parliamentary democracy with his “Basic Democracies” system and introduced the 1962 Constitution. The subsequent martial law of General Yahya Khan (1969-1971) dismantled the One Unit, persisting until the country’s traumatic breakup. General Ziaul Haq (1977-1988) reshaped politics through a technocratic and heavily controlled order, introducing non-party elections in 1985. General Pervez Musharraf (1999-2008) repeated the pattern with another military-led technocratic model, the 2001 Devolution Plan, district governments and the Legal Framework Order, all presented as remedies for a supposedly broken political class.
Civilian governments are not immune to this desire for alterations to the constitutional architecture. The Eighth Amendment (1985) empowered presidents to dismiss elected governments; the 13th Amendment (1997) removed those same powers. The 17th Amendment (2003) restored many of them under Musharraf before the 18th Amendment (2010) again shifted Pakistan decisively back toward parliamentary federalism.
Each redesign has promised stability. Each claimed to correct the failures of its predecessor. Each eventually gave way to another redesign.
The common thread was not that these proposals lacked merit, with some addressing genuine administrative deficiencies. Their failures stemmed from a more fundamental problem: they never enjoyed durable political ownership. Not matter how sound, any system imposed from above rarely survives once the political circumstances that create it disappear. Institutions derive legitimacy from consent, not simply from efficiency.
Rumors circulating within Islamabad’s power circles suggest any future restructuring might seek to avoid this by seeking public buy-in through a national referendum. It is too soon to say whether such reports prove accurate, but even if such a referendum were to materialize, it would hardly settle the matter. Virtually every major election in the country has prompted allegations of manipulation, disputes over results and challenges to legitimacy. Why, then, should a constitutional referendum be immune from precisely the same concerns? A disputed referendum would merely replace one legitimacy crisis with another.
There is no doubt that Pakistan’s governance requires reform. Population growth, uneven development and administrative inefficiency make that self-evident. Sustainable reform, however, cannot be engineered through another top-down redesign conceived by unelected power centers or insulated policymakers. It must emerge through open political competition, parliamentary consensus and public confidence in the process itself.
More than seven decades after independence, Pakistan continues to function as a laboratory of abandoned experiments: One Unit, martial laws, presidential systems, technocratic governments, controlled democracies, local government overhauls and repeated constitutional redesigns. Nearly every institutional model has been attempted, revised or discarded.
The one experiment that has never truly been allowed to run its full course? Permitting elected politicians to govern, succeed or fail, free from persistent influence, interruption or pressure from unelected quarters. Until that “experiment” is finally attempted, the country should expect every new blueprint to end much like those before it: promising transformation, delivering disappointment, and eventually joining the long list of discarded experiments that have defined Pakistan’s political history.