An historic consensus

Earlier this month, Pakistan’s National Assembly voted 292 to 0 to amend the country’s Constitution, passing more power from the President to the Prime Minister and from the centre to the provincial governments. The Senate followed suit and the amendment has been signed into law.

The change restores the Constitution to something closer to the 1973 version, cleansing it of many self-serving adjustments during military rule, and making good on decades-old promises of decentralisation. There were, of course, last minute excitements and there have since been Supreme Court challenges, demonstrations in the streets and allegations that the politicians only passed amendments that made their lives easier.  But the consensus on the overall package has held and it contains many good things, like a commitment to primary education for all.

Yet possibly even more important than the substance of the amendment was the manner of its achievement. A committee in which all the parties in parliament were represented had some 70 meetings over a period of four months to hammer out agreement.  Real compromises were made between fierce political opponents, between parties from different parts of the country, between large parties and small parties.  In the end, the committee achieved sufficient consensus for their proposed constitutional amendments to be voted through the National Assembly unanimously.

Repeat, unanimously.  That’s a really remarkable achievement of political consensus building.  If Britain, after its general election this week, finds itself for the first time in its thousand year history trying to write a constitution, I wonder whether the much smaller number of British political parties would make such good progress with so relatively little acrimony in the space of just four months.  I think the process as much as the substance of Pakistan’s constitutional amendment shows encouraging parliamentary will to rebuild civilian government and encouraging patience about helping it to grow stronger roots.