The sleek appeal of new provinces
Asking for a new province is – to use the parlance of fashion-types – the new black. It goes well with any party ethos these days. A sign that the idea has truly arrived is when the Leagues, otherwise Pakistan’s more centralist political entities, have also jumped on the bandwagon. The romance of new provinces with the voters is just too big not to get a piece of.
It is still not clear whether the PML(N)’s follow up on the latest fad is prompted by an ideological change of heart or a desire to throw a spanner in the works of the PPP-hijacked demand for a Seraiki province. In asking for a Bahawalpur province, the League seems to want to embolden the Bahawalpur/Multan wedge in the whole southern Punjab plan. Further credence is lent to this explanation by the League’s simultaneous advocacy for creating new provinces on administrative – as opposed to linguistic – grounds.
The PML(N) will have an unlikely ally in the argument for administrative grounds: the MQM. With the realisation sunk in that the changing ethnic demography of Karachi has killed off the basis of a “Mohajir province”, the carving of Sindh on administrative grounds is just about the only opening that the MQM has into the whole game.
The ANP, no stranger to espousing decentralist and revisionist federalism, has jumped in as well. In a significant development, its leaders have started advocating a southern Pukhtunkhwa. Even though the PkMAP – in its earlier avatar, the Wrore Pukhtun – was a part of the NAP, the Frontier NAP didn’t really follow up on the Pushtun Balochistan theme lest it attract the ire of the Baloch component of the party. That seems to have changed now.
Without weighing the merits and demerits of the proposed new provinces, it has to be pointed out that the political parties are placing transient political gain over putting serious thought into the issue at hand. A lopsided federation we may be but the provincial boundaries have been around for quite some time now; any tinkering with them has to follow a steady, sustained exercise in negotiations, dialogue and getting the math right.
For more than half a century, the centralist ideologues have been scaring us with the prospect of Balkanisation. If the new provinces’ debate isn’t backed by a rigorous intellectual framework, these ideologues just might turn out to have been right all along.