New World Order and World War III

Pakistan does not have a shortage of governments. It has a shortage of governance. The Constitution promises power to the people, but the money and the decisions stay in provincial capitals. A mother in Khuzdar waits for a hospital that Quetta forgot to fund. A father in Sahiwal sends his child to a school that Lahore never inspects. The distance between the citizen and the state is not measured in miles. It is measured in signatures, files, and political mood. The Constitution already knows this is wrong. Article 140A says every province must devolve power to elected local representatives. But that is all it says, a skeletal clause with no fixed tenure, no election deadline, and no guaranteed funding. It is a promise written in smoke. A single signature can dissolve a local government, elections can be postponed indefinitely, and local budgets can be reduced to zero overnight. When the rules are this fragile, governance becomes impossible. A mayor who can be fired by ordinance cannot sign a contract to build a road. A council that may not exist next year cannot hire a professional to run a hospital. A budget that arrives only if the provincial finance minister is in a good mood cannot pay for textbooks or vaccines. The fix is not complicated. Article 140A must be strengthened to include three guarantees. Every elected local government must serve a full five-year term, synchronized with the provincial assembly. It cannot be dissolved by ordinance or executive order. The only way to remove it is a two-thirds vote of the provincial assembly, a high threshold that ensures broad consensus. When tenure is secure, local leaders can plan beyond the next political season. Local elections must happen on the same day as provincial assembly polls. When you vote for your MPA, you vote for your local councilor on the same ballot. The mayor is then elected by those councilors. The only difference is that the election actually happens, on time, every five years, without delay or discretion. And a fixed percentage of provincial development funds must flow to districts through a transparent formula, population plus backwardness plus performance. The money moves automatically to the local government account. No approval required. No delay permitted. With these three guarantees in place, the district becomes what it was meant to be: the place where governance actually happens. A mayor with a real budget and real time can fix the sewer on your street because he needs your vote in five years. A council with secure tenure can hire an engineer to repair the school roof instead of waiting for a file to move through a provincial secretariat. A health budget that arrives automatically can keep a doctor at the rural clinic six days a week. This matters across thousands of union councils and hundreds of tehsil and municipal bodies that already exist under provincial local government acts, from the largest metropolitan corporations to the smallest town committees. Each one represents citizens who currently have a vote but no voice, a representative but no revenue. In districts where this works, where roads get built, schools get roofs, clinics get medicine, and the accounts are published, citizens will see something they have never seen before: a government that delivers because it is close enough to hear them and accountable enough to fear them. In districts where it fails, where the money disappears, the projects stall, and the accounts are blank, citizens will know exactly who failed, because the mayor’s name is on the ballot and the audit is on the website. This is how governance evolves in stable democracies. You empower the unit that already exists, let it prove its competence, and let the people decide what follows. If a district can educate its children, heal its sick, and pave its roads better than a distant capital can, the argument makes itself. Pakistan has spent decades concentrating power in a few hands and complaining about the results. Whether or not new provinces are created, the answer begins in the same place: with the districts that already exist. Let them prove what better governance looks like. Amend Article 140A. Give the district its money, its term, and its election. The people deserve better than promises that dissolve with a signature. They deserve a government that earns its authority by delivering results, starting where they live.

The original 1973 Constitution, Charter of Democracy (COD), and the landmark 18th Amendment all call for a strong local government system. Till today, it remains the unfinished agenda of good governance. It is key to the modernization of the state, society, and politics. The consensual Constitution was a miracle and a masterstroke of the elected government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (ZAB). Devolution was a cornerstone of this document, so painfully drafted by elected representatives of the people. As the newly created provinces after the break-up of the infamous One Unit lacked the capacity to handle vital areas like education, health, and agriculture, a concurrent list was prepared to devolve these departments systematically to the provincial governments. A Department of Provincial Coordination was created to oversee this transfer from Islamabad to Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, and Quetta. Unfortunately, after the fall of the government in July 1977, the entire process was stalled. Governments that followed did not take this transfer seriously, resulting in serious governance issues. The two mainstream political parties of the time, PPP and PML-N, followed with the COD in May 2006, in which it was agreed to build an effective local government system. Unfortunately, after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the driving force behind the Charter, it was not fully adhered to. Instead, the 18th Amendment was passed by the legislature in April 2010 to restore the original document. Through this constitutional clean-up, Islamabad was cut to size while power and resources were handed over to the provincial governments, with the hope that they would be devolved all the way down to the tehsil and union council levels. But that did not take place. While the federal government was depleted, the provinces grew fat and started indulging in frivolous projects. In Punjab, Lahore was developed as a flagship showcase project for publicity while the rest of the province was left to languish. Karachi was ignored; resources were moved inland by the provincial government. The menace of incompetence, corruption, and abuse of authority has to be addressed at the national level before it is devolved; otherwise, it will be more of the same. The Civil Secretariat in Lahore, also called Lat Sahib Ka Daftar, which runs the largest province of the federation, reveals it all. Office hours are not observed; files do not move without wheels; records are poorly managed. There was a time when the Chief Minister resided only in GOR-I on Club Road, while official work was carried out at the Secretariat, but not anymore. Most senior officers (Chief Secretary, Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner, etc.) have established home offices, resulting in duplication and waste. Till the decade of the 1970s, only the telephone operator and one coordinator manned most official residences, but not anymore. Great Britain ruled the world with its Commissioners System. The only difference was that there was civilian oversight and accountability by the British Parliament, which has faded over time in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (IRP). Till today, the flag is unfurled at the office and residence of the Deputy Commissioner (DC), as representative of the Crown with sovereign powers (administrative, judicial, and revenue). Over the years, some judicial powers have been taken away; otherwise, the DC runs the district while the Commissioner controls the division. Recently, in Lahore, the Commissioner’s office was moved from the Sanda area to the Mall, across from Aitchison College. It is a fancy structure right on the main artery of the city, where millions have been spent on refurbishing the building vacated by the Naval Staff College, which was established close to the waters of the Lahore Canal. Perhaps it has been moved to the BRB waters now. One office move has strained the budget of the province. What will happen if scores of such infrastructures are built for new provincial governments? Growing up on the Mall, close to the Town Hall (Lahore Municipal Corporation, now Metropolitan Corporation of Lahore), my memory is of a functional city run by an elected mayor. Today, the metropolis is non-functional as it is under the control of the bureaucracy instead of an accountable elected representative of the people. In the USA, the President runs the federation, the fifty states are under the Governors, while the Mayor controls the city, all directly elected by the people. Except for the President, there is an Electoral College as well. The state of Texas is larger in area than Pakistan, yet it is fully functional. The cities are run by elected city governments. Town hall meetings are regularly held where public input is solicited to improve services; service to the people is the common agenda. Once the system is made functional by getting rid of the evils, devolution can be effective. The federal government has offices in major cities of America, but most day-to-day work is carried out by state and city governments. The Americans believe that no government is the best government; as such, employment is limited to minimal functional staff. Procedures are updated and simplified for the smooth flow of work. Obstacles are removed for functionality. More of the same has never worked in the past, nor will it work in the future. Dysfunctional bureaucracy has to be made functional to kick-start the stalled system for real devolution to take place.

For eighteen years, I have made a quiet, sometimes lonely case: that technology, not more paperwork and more offices, is the only honest path to good governance in Pakistan. I did not arrive at this conviction from a textbook. I arrived at it from a desk inside the Planning Commission, watching a system that was designed — on paper — to deliver development, and instead delivered delay, opacity, and grievance. Anyone who has sat through the sanctioning of a Public Sector Development Program (PSDP) project knows the ritual. The feasibility study is glowing. The PC-1 is approved with confident projections. Committees nod. Funds are released. And then the project disappears into the machinery of provincial implementation, where oversight thins out and accountability evaporates. What was promised on paper and what is delivered on the ground are, more often than not, two entirely different stories. I watched this happen again and again, and each time the gap between sanction and delivery was not explained by a shortage of money or expertise. It was explained by bureaucracy — a system built not to serve citizens but to preserve itself. This is not an abstract observation. It is the root of a very real and very dangerous problem. A significant part of the unrest we see in Balochistan, in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not simply about resources or geography. It is about the absence of transparency and the absence of governance that people can see, question, and trust. When a citizen cannot find out where a development fund went, when a project sanctioned in Islamabad never materializes as promised in a district headquarters, when the only visible authority is a bureaucrat with a stamp and a discretionary signature, resentment grows. People do not rebel against distance from the capital. They rebel against being governed by a system that treats them as subjects to be managed rather than citizens to be served. And here is the tragedy that too few are willing to name plainly: the bureaucratic architecture we still operate under was never designed to serve the governed. It was designed by the British Raj to control a colonized population — to extract revenue, maintain order, and ensure that authority always flowed downward from a distant center, never upward from the people. Files, layers of clearance, and the personal discretion of an officer were features of a colonial control system, not instruments of democratic accountability. We inherited that machinery at independence and, astonishingly, kept it largely intact. The tool built to pacify a colony has been repurposed, with barely a redesign, to govern a republic. It should trouble us deeply that a structure engineered to keep a colonized people in check is now one of the principal reasons that Pakistan’s most marginalized regions distrust their own government. So when the conversation turns, as it periodically does, to creating new administrative units — carving out new divisions, new districts, new tiers of provincial machinery — as the answer to Balochistan’s or KPK’s grievances, I feel obligated to push back, loudly. Before we draw a single new administrative boundary, we must confront the core disease, not multiply its symptoms. New units will not dilute bureaucratic power; they will replicate it. Every new administrative tier is another office, another set of discretionary signatures, another opportunity for the same colonial-era logic of gatekeeping to entrench itself further. For the aggrieved citizen in Turbat or Muzaffarabad or Bannu, a new secretariat is not relief. It is simply a new address for the same unaccountable authority. We would be handing the bureaucracy — an institution that has shown a consistent instinct for self-preservation — more territory to govern, not less power to abuse. Real relief requires shrinking the space in which discretion operates unchecked, not expanding the number of desks where it can be exercised. This is precisely why the moment for AI-enabled local governance has arrived, and why Pakistan can no longer afford to treat it as a distant aspiration. Around the world, and notably across India, urban local bodies and municipalities are moving beyond basic digitization toward what might be called algorithms of accountability — systems purpose-built to increase transparency, limit human discretion where it invites abuse, and protect citizen data. These frameworks generally rest on a few consistent pillars: ensuring that automated public decisions on things like welfare disbursement or tax assessment can be audited and challenged rather than buried in a file; protecting citizen data through clear legal safeguards; requiring any private vendor supplying government technology to disclose how its systems work; and actively checking automated tools for bias against marginalized communities. The Indian experience offers concrete, transferable lessons. Municipal bodies in cities like Delhi and Bengaluru now use satellite imagery and mapping systems to flag unauthorized construction and property tax discrepancies — but critically, they pair this with a human-verification step, so an algorithm’s flag is only ever an advisory alert, not a final punishment, creating a documented trail a citizen can actually contest. States such as Telangana and Maharashtra have deployed multilingual citizen chatbots to handle civic complaints, built with data-masking safeguards that strip personal information before it ever touches a broader system. Smart-city command centers in Surat and Pune operate under strict data retention rules, so surveillance footage is automatically deleted unless tied to an active investigation, preventing the machinery from becoming a permanent surveillance state. And where facial-recognition attendance systems have been used to track municipal staff, unions pushed successfully for dispute mechanisms so that a technical glitch never costs a worker their wages. None of these systems eliminate human judgment. What they eliminate is unaccountable, invisible, discretionary human judgment — the exact currency the colonial bureaucracy was built to trade in. That is the reform Pakistan needs at the local government level: not another administrative layer, but a transparent, auditable, citizen-facing system that makes it structurally difficult for a project to vanish between sanction and delivery, and structurally easy for a citizen in the

A society does not collapse the day corruption is discovered; it begins to decay the day corruption becomes ordinary. The Sindh Public Service Commission (SPSC), established to uphold merit and provide equal opportunities to the youth of Sindh, has repeatedly found itself at the center of controversy. Allegations of paper leaks, irregularities, and lack of transparency have steadily eroded public confidence, leading thousands of young aspirants to raise their voices in protest. Reports of demonstrations against SPSC over recruitment and examination concerns, as well as past official action following examination irregularities, reflect the depth of this mistrust. The title, “Cockroaches Approaching the Granary,” is symbolic. A granary stores the food that sustains a nation, while cockroaches represent decay, contamination, and silent destruction. Public institutions responsible for selecting the brightest minds are the granaries of governance. If corruption, negligence, or manipulation infiltrates these institutions, they contaminate not merely examinations but the very future of society. The protests by the youth of Sindh are not simply demonstrations against one institution. They are a cry for justice, transparency, and dignity. Behind every candidate stands a family that has invested years of sacrifice, countless hours of preparation, and unwavering hope. When the credibility of competitive examinations is questioned, it is not only individual dreams that are shattered; public trust in the state’s promise of equal opportunity is weakened. This struggle echoes a wider regional concern. Across South Asia, young people have repeatedly taken to the streets whenever examination systems were perceived to have failed them. In India, nationwide protests over alleged examination paper leaks became a powerful reminder that education and public recruitment derive their legitimacy from public trust. Whether in India or Pakistan, the message from the youth remains remarkably similar: merit cannot survive where examination integrity is compromised. The issue transcends politics. It is fundamentally about governance. Every leaked paper, every allegation of favoritism, and every unexplained irregularity diminishes the value of honest effort. When deserving candidates begin to believe that influence outweighs competence, a dangerous message spreads across society: hard work is no longer enough. The consequences extend far beyond recruitment. Civil servants, lecturers, engineers, doctors, and administrators selected through questionable processes ultimately shape the institutions that govern millions. Weak recruitment today becomes weak governance tomorrow. A nation that compromises on merit ultimately compromises on its future. Yet this moment also presents an opportunity. The protests of Sindh’s youth should not be viewed merely as expressions of anger but as demands for institutional reform. Transparent examination procedures, secure digital systems, independent oversight, prompt investigations into alleged irregularities, and public accountability can restore confidence. Institutions earn respect not by claiming perfection but by responding credibly to legitimate concerns. History reminds us that nations progress when their institutions are stronger than individual interests. The youth of Sindh are asking for nothing extraordinary. They seek only a level playing field where success is determined by knowledge, ability, and perseverance rather than by connections or corruption. The metaphor of cockroaches approaching the granary serves as a warning. If the guardians of merit fail to protect the granary, decay will eventually consume the harvest. But if institutions choose transparency over secrecy and accountability over complacency, the granary can once again nourish hope instead of despair. The future of Sindh depends not merely on educating its youth but on convincing them that their honesty, talent, and hard work will always be rewarded. Merit is the foundation of every successful society. Once that foundation cracks, the entire structure stands in peril.

In the long chronicle of human affairs, few pursuits have more clearly revealed the character of a people than the search for good governance. Our predecessors, whether the wise administrators of earlier ages or those who laid the foundations of our own constitutional order, grasped this truth with a seriousness that still commands reflection. They understood that the art of governing is not a mere technique of power, but a moral undertaking. Authority, they held, is a trust held on behalf of the community, to be discharged with restraint, justice, and an eye to the welfare of generations yet unborn. Their systems, though shaped by the limitations of their times, were animated by principles of accountability, the supremacy of law over personal will, and the conviction that public office is a burden rather than a prize. Courts were expected to stand as impartial arbiters; civil servants were trained to place duty above favour; and rulers, at their best, recognised that their legitimacy rested upon the consent and confidence of the governed. We received from them a framework of institutions—representative assemblies, independent judiciaries, administrative services, and a body of laws intended to curb arbitrary power. These were not perfect creations, yet they embodied an aspiration toward order tempered by fairness. Public life retained, for considerable periods, a measure of dignity. Corruption existed, as it has in every age, but it was more often regarded as a shameful departure from the norm rather than an accepted condition of advancement. The methods of our predecessors rested upon a shared moral vocabulary; honour in public dealing, frugality in the use of common resources, and a sense that the strong bore a particular responsibility toward the weak. Where, then, do we stand today when measured against that inheritance? The forms of good governance remain visible—constitutions are still sworn to, elections are still held, statutes continue to be enacted—yet the substance has in many places grown thin. Trust between the people and the state appears to be fading. Justice is frequently perceived as uneven, accessible more readily to those of means or influence than to the ordinary person. Administrative machinery, designed to serve, is too often entangled in delay, patronage, and self-interest. Political discourse has become coarse and transactional, with loyalty to party or person frequently eclipsing loyalty to principle or the public good. The gap between proclaimed ideals and daily practice has widened, leaving many citizens disillusioned and inclined to withdraw from civic responsibility altogether. If failure must be acknowledged—and candour requires that it should—the causes are several and interwoven. Foremost among them is a progressive weakening of personal character in public life. Ambition has too often been severed from a corresponding sense of duty. The pursuit of power and material advantage has overshadowed the older ideal of service. Political culture has drifted toward clientelism, wherein positions and favours are distributed as rewards rather than earned through merit. Institutions that ought to act as checks upon excess have themselves become vulnerable to capture, their independence eroded by pressure, inducement, or the quiet fear of consequence. Education, which should have formed citizens capable of discerning right from expedient, has frequently neglected the cultivation of ethical judgement in favour of technical competence or mere qualification. Economic pressures and rapid social change have compounded these weaknesses, fostering a climate in which short-term gain appears more urgent than long-term integrity. Over all has settled a collective habit of blame; each segment of society is ready to indict the others while absolving itself. Have we, then, discharged our responsibilities as individuals, as institutions, and as a nation? The record is sobering. As individuals, many of us have grown content to lament the state of affairs while participating, in small ways or large, in the very practices we condemn—evading obligations, seeking special treatment, remaining silent when honesty would exact a cost. Institutions have too often placed institutional survival or the interests of their leaders above the purpose for which they were created. In prima facia, courts drag their feet, legislatures focus on partisan gain, and administrative bodies forget about the citizens they’re meant to serve. As a nation, we have allowed divisions of interest, region, and allegiance to weaken the sense of a shared destiny. Necessary reforms have been postponed; uncomfortable truths have been left unspoken; and the common good has been subordinated to immediate political calculation. Yet history is not an irreversible descent. Peoples have recovered from moral and administrative decline when they recovered first the will to examine themselves without illusion. Correction of direction remains possible, though it will demand more than rhetoric or the rearrangement of outward forms. It begins with the recovery of personal integrity in ordinary dealings, for no system can long remain honest if those who operate it and those who live under it are themselves careless of truth. It requires institutions to reclaim their independence and to remember that their authority derives from the public trust, not from the favour of transient power. It calls for a renewed national conversation about the ends of government—not merely the distribution of resources or the winning of elections, but the creation of conditions in which citizens may live with dignity, security, and hope. Education must once more address the formation of character as seriously as the acquisition of skill. Civic engagement must cease to be regarded as the province of a few and become again the ordinary duty of many. The task is arduous and will meet resistance from those who profit by the present disorder. Yet the alternative is a continuing erosion of confidence, a further coarsening of public life, and the gradual loss of that cohesion without which no society can endure. Our predecessors bequeathed us not a completed structure but a charge and an example. Whether we prove equal to that charge depends upon choices that are still ours to make. If we summon the courage to prefer principle to expediency, duty to advantage, and the long view to the immediate reward, the

A recent five-member judgment of the Supreme Court has settled an important question of Pakistani company law. It has also exposed a deeper weakness in our justice system: even when fraud is ultimately defeated, the victim may receive no meaningful compensation for the years consumed in recovering what was unlawfully taken. In Abdul Razzaq v Registrar of Companies, Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan and others, Civil Appeal No. 125 of 2025, decided on April 22, 2026, the Court held that the passage of time could not protect a fraudulent entry in a company’s register of members. The ruling affirms Naila Naeem Younus v Indus Services Limited (2022 SCMR 1171), under which a petition for rectification of the register under section 126 of the Companies Act, 2017 is not barred by limitation where shares have been taken through fraud. The decision is legally compelling. The register of members determines who owns shares, receives dividends, votes at meetings and exercises corporate control. A fraudulent alteration is therefore not a technical defect. It can amount to stealing ownership through manipulation of the company’s official record. The Court has rightly refused to allow deception to become title merely because it remained concealed for several years. Fraud is usually designed to remain undiscovered. Applying a rigid limitation period in favour of the person concealing it would reward the very conduct that the law is meant to prevent. The judgment also resolves the uncertainty arising from Bentonite Pakistan Limited v Bankers Equity Limited (2023 SCMR 1353), in which observations had suggested that Article 181 of the Limitation Act could apply to company-law proceedings. The larger bench has clarified that a rectification petition is not an “application” governed by that provision. This doctrinal clarity is welcome. The harder question is what justice means after the fraud has lasted for years. A person fraudulently deprived of shares may lose dividends, voting rights, managerial control and participation in rights or bonus issues. The wrongdoer may meanwhile control the company, use its assets and finance the litigation from benefits derived through the disputed shareholding. After 10 or 20 years, an order restoring the shares may correct the register. It does not necessarily compensate the victim. This problem extends far beyond company law. In Pakistan, fraudulent possession and prolonged litigation often operate together. Land, inheritance, commercial assets and corporate rights are appropriated through false documents or manipulated records. Once challenged, the beneficiary denies everything, seeks adjournments, produces further documents and carries the matter through every available forum. Delay becomes a business strategy. The wrongdoer retains the asset while the victim pays to recover it. Even after losing, the wrongdoer may be required only to return property that never lawfully belonged to him. Nominal costs do little to alter this calculation. A rational legal system must ensure that fraud and frivolous litigation are economically unattractive. Otherwise, the expected gain from wrongdoing remains greater than its expected cost. Pakistan needs to move towards a genuine cost-based justice system. This does not mean obstructing access to courts or punishing honest litigants who fail to prove a bona fide claim. It means distinguishing genuine disputes from proceedings maintained through deliberate falsehood, concealment, forged documents or tactical delay. The Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 provides for costs, and the federal Costs of Litigation Act, 2017 recognises actual, adjournment and special costs in specified circumstances. The larger principle should be applied far more effectively: an innocent litigant should not be forced to finance the other side’s abuse of judicial process. Where fraud is established, courts should ordinarily consider restoration of all benefits obtained from the disputed property, interest for the period of deprivation, realistic legal expenses and enhanced costs where false or vexatious pleas prolonged the case. In corporate cases, this could include an account of dividends, bonus and rights shares, remuneration obtained through control, and other measurable benefits flowing from the fraudulent entry. Section 126(4) also permits referral of fraudulent conduct for proceedings under section 127. Such referrals should be made where the evidence warrants them. The constitutional dimension should not be ignored. Article 10A of the Constitution guarantees fair trial and due process, while Articles 23 and 24 protect property. A right restored after decades, without compensation for its prolonged deprivation, is only partially vindicated. The Supreme Court has correctly ruled that fraud cannot shelter behind the calendar. Our jurisprudence must now adopt the accompanying principle that fraud cannot profit from the judicial calendar either. Justice must do more than correct an entry after years of litigation. It must remove the financial benefit of wrongdoing, compensate the victim as far as reasonably possible and impose realistic costs on those who misuse courts to preserve the proceeds of fraud. Only then will delayed justice cease to be an investment for the wrongdoer. _______________________________________________________________________   Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds an LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.