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April 8, 2010 will be remembered as a mile stone in the constitutional history of Pakistan as National Assembly of Pakistan passed constitutional bill of Eighteenth Amendment in the Constitution of Pakistan 1973. It was a major breakthrough, the presidential authority to dissolve the parliament was abolished. According to the Parliamentary Constitutional Committee this amendment is an effort to revive the original shape of 1973 Constitution by maintaining balance of power between organs of the state. It changed the political culture of Pakistan from semipresidential to parliamentary. An important development due to this amendment is renaming of North-West Frontier Province as 'Khyber Pakhtunkhwa'. Moreover the word "Baluchistan" was replaced with the word "Balochistan", and "Sind" with the word "Sindh".1 The dictators disfigured the original constitution 1973 according to their own vested interest. It has become more democratic and parliamentary after the amendment and can ease political insecurity and instability in the country. The Senate of Pakistan passed the bill on April 15, 2010 and became an act of parliament when President Asif Ali Zardari signed on the bill on April 19, 2010. It was for the first time in the history of Pakistan that a president voluntarily withdrew a significant part of his powers happily and transferred them to parliament and the office of the prime minister to strengthen the democratic system.
The issue of provincial autonomy had been of great importance since the establishment of Pakistan and it was also an important cause in delay of constitution making. The Objective Resolution and certain clauses of Govt, of India Act 1935, which were adopted as Interim Constitution could not solve the problem of provincial autonomy along with other provincial rights due to which disharmony and distrust was automatically created among different provinces. Chaudhry Muhammad Ali tried to resolve these issues by introducing one unit scheme and later on the Constitution of 1956. Due to this the already complex situation became worst. It was one of the major factor for imposition of first martial law in Pakistan because the political system had failed to satisfy all the units on the issue of provincial autonomy. The 1956 Constitution could have been improved despite certain draw-backs but the political masters and the creator of the constitution had themselves...