Hafeez Ahmed
Pakistan is a federation. That is not a casual observation. It is a constitutional reality rooted in the Quaid’s Fourteen Points, the Objectives Resolution of 1949, and decades of political struggle by the provinces against a centralising impulse that has never quite gone away. Every few years, this impulse reappears in a new disguise. Today, it wears the disguise of administrative reform.
The proposed concept of a “Unified Civil Service” under the Twenty-Eighth Amendment is not a neutral policy idea. It is a direct assault on the federal architecture of Pakistan, and anyone who cares about genuine governance must say so plainly.
Let us begin with a basic question: how can a single, centralised civil service function across four entirely distinct layers of government? We have the federal government at the top. We have provincial governments, each with its own legislature, its own domain of authority, and its own democratic mandate. We have the Council of Common Interests, a constitutionally established forum designed precisely to balance federal and provincial interests. And we have local governments, which the constitution recognises as the third tier of governance. These are not identical institutions. They have different functions, different accountabilities, and different relationships with the people they serve. How, then, can one unified bureaucratic structure serve all of them without subordinating every layer to the interests of the centre?
The answer is that it cannot. And that is precisely the point.
A Unified Civil Service, in the context of a federation, is not a reform. It is a takeover. When you design a system where every officer from the district level upward is part of the same centralised career structure, climbing toward Grade 22 through a single chain of command, you have effectively told local governments and provincial governments that they do not really govern anything. The real power lies with the administrative elite at the top, and everyone below merely executes their instructions. This is not federalism. This is the colonial model dressed in the language of efficiency.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah understood this danger. The Independence of India Act 1947 was meant to be a rupture with the colonial administrative order, not a continuation of it. The colonial civil service was built for extraction and control, not for democratic governance. It was designed to rule people, not serve them. When Jinnah stood for the Fourteen Points against the Nehru Report, he was insisting that Pakistan would not be a unitary state under a different name. He was insisting on genuine provincial autonomy, genuine distribution of power, and genuine accountability at every level. Pakistan and India carry two opposite ideologies on this question, and it is therefore deeply misleading to point to India’s model of an All-India Service as a justification for importing the same structure here.
The federal bureaucracy knows all of this. The civil service leadership is not confused about constitutional principles. This is why the pattern of manipulation is so troubling. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment was used to restore colonial executive magistracy, a power that had no place in a modern democratic framework. Now the Twenty-Eighth Amendment is being shaped toward a Unified Civil Service that would effectively re-centralise administrative authority in the hands of a bureaucratic class that answers to no one in any meaningful way. This is not accidental. It is a deliberate, calculated effort by a powerful interest group to use constitutional amendment processes to entrench its own position.
The example of the Police Service makes this pattern visible. In practice, the Police Service of Pakistan has already evolved into something close to a unified civil service in the security domain. The consequences are plain. Balochistan cannot genuinely police itself. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa cannot build a truly autonomous, accountable policing system rooted in local realities. The institutional gap this creates does not remain empty. Military institutions fill it, because someone has to maintain order when the civil structures are too centralised to function at the local level. Had policing been genuinely provincial and genuinely accountable to local governments, this gap would not have opened with such devastating consequences for both stability and democratic governance.
A Unified Civil Service would replicate this failure across every domain of governance. Agriculture, education, health, local infrastructure, urban administration: all of these would become territories controlled not by elected representatives accountable to voters, but by appointed officers accountable only to their superiors in a hierarchical structure that ultimately serves its own interests.
Federalism requires something different. It requires that local governments have their own civil servants, trained for local realities, accountable to local elected bodies, and measured by local outcomes. It requires that provincial governments control their own bureaucracies, not borrow officers from a central pool who carry the culture, loyalties, and career incentives of a national service. It requires that the Council of Common Interests function as a genuine forum for inter-governmental coordination, not as a rubber stamp for whatever the federal bureaucracy has already decided. And it requires that the federal government itself be served by a civil service whose role is coordination and policy, not domination.
This is not a radical demand. It is what the constitution already envisions. The Eighteenth Amendment moved Pakistan significantly in this direction. What is now being proposed would move it sharply backward.
If administrative reform is genuinely the goal, then the reform must follow the constitution. It must strengthen provincial capacity, not weaken it. It must empower local governments with their own professional staff, not leave them dependent on officers whose first loyalty is to a national career hierarchy. It must create accountability structures at every tier of government, not concentrate unaccountable power at the centre.
Pakistan’s federal structure, its provincial autonomy, and its local democratic institutions must not be surrendered to the career interests of a bureaucratic class that has already done enough damage. The Twenty-Eighth Amendment must be scrutinised for exactly this reason. The question is not whether Pakistan needs administrative reform. It does. The question is whether reform will serve the constitution or betray it.
History suggests we should not be optimistic. But the national conversation on this question is now unavoidable.
