The BJP province proposal

The legitimate demand for a Seraiki province is being trivialised

If the current Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)-led coalition government had ever been serious about the creation of a new province in the Punjab, the rushed proposal to create the Bahawalpur-Janoobi Punjab province appears to have rid us of any such pretensions.

How the coalition partners imagined it would not be opposed by Punjab’s government party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), if presented on the eve of the next general election is outside comprehension.

The proposal itself, presented by the National Assembly Committee on New Provinces in Punjab, has attempted to placate two contradictory demands: to either create one Seraiki province or create two provinces, Southern Punjab and Bahawalpur. The earlier demand has been seen as advantageous for the PPP, which can see itself forming government and taking key from such a province. The latter demand is seen as to advantageous for the PML-N, whose support in Bahawalpur has traditionally been more than the rest of Southern Punjab, and it could find itself in the ruling coalition in such a regional block.

With the PPP controlling the National Assembly and the PML-N controlling the Punjab Assembly, both are seeing the division of the province of Punjab through the narrow lens of consolidating their control in both centre and region. Some of the criticism for the emergence of such a situation must be driven at those pushing the Seraiki national movement for having let mainstream political parties control public opinion around the issue of the new province.

No dissenting opinions have been heard as the Gilanis, the Durranis and the Abbasis debate the future of the Seraiki people. The raison d’être of the demand for the Seraiki province was three-fold: to get rid of the ‘crown of Lahore’ (or Takht-e-Lahore), to consolidate the cultural ethos of the Seraiki people (which has much to share with the peoples of the Indus Valley) and to let the toiling people of the Southern part of the Punjab to concentrate their struggle against the local feudal setup.

The current proposal to create a province called Bahawalpur South Punjab appears to only promise the deliverance of the first while strengthening the position of existing feudal powers. The campaign for the creation of the Bahawalpur province, in particular, has revived the dwindling influence of the family of the former Nawab of Bahawalpur. The campaign has continued to centre itself around the Nawab Salahuddin and giving him new political life by making him chief of the Bahawalpur National Awami Party and thus a ‘stakeholder’ being reached out to by both the PPP and PML-N.

The unfortunate part is that there has been no notable mass mobilisation against the growing power of traditional power holders in the Southern Punjab under the guise of Seraiki or regional nationalism. The need to decentralise political power and recognise the cultural and economic rights of the Seraiki people notwithstanding, it is the fact that the powers that be are using it to consolidate local fiefdoms that is most troubling.

The potential of the idea of the Seraiki Wasaib and the powerful re-articulation of the ecological, economic and cultural life of the peoples of the province amongst Seraiki intellectuals and poets has been unable to spill over into the logos behind the new province proposal. The failure has been its inability to translate into the everyday of Seraiki politics. The history of the emergence of the Seraiki identity appears to be one of material deprivation consolidating itself into a cultural contradiction. However, the debate on material deprivation appears to now be confined to the role of central Punjab and Lahore in creating regional deprivation.

That said, the fundamental proposal to create a Seraiki province, is a progressive one. That industrial zones, education and health care facilities continue to be better in central Punjab is a fact. The Punjab government has continued to spend needlessly on Lahore – the most recent example of which is the Rs 32 billion spent out of the provincial coffers on the chief minister’s pet project: the Metro Bus Service. The ruling party of Punjab has all but forgotten that southern Punjab was inundated by floods only two summers ago and the current deadly measles outbreak in the region is a consequence of such neglect. Some of Pakistan’s most neglected and impoverished districts remain in Punjab’s south. Separating the region and creating a province would mean such neglect shall have both immediate and electoral consequences for ruling elites which fail to deliver.

The other progressive possibility in the demand to create the Seraiki province was of a departure from the administrative logic imposed during the colonial period and continued by the Pakistani state. This logic was seen in action in the division and reunification of Bengal and the division of Sindh in the early 1900s, the division of Punjab in 1947 and the proclamation of the ‘One Unit’ in 1955. However, the hope that Pakistan’s ruling elites would recognise the need to depart from self-interested, short-term measures has been banished in the current PPP-PML-N tussle over the shape and contours of the southern province. Moreover, their continued refusal to accept Seraiki cultural identity reeks of the same mentality of denying local traditions that led to the independence movement in East Pakistan.

The Seraiki area is in itself culturally diverse. The settlement of Baloch tribes began 200 years ago while farmers from eastern Punjab began to settle a hundred years ago. Unlike Sindh, these settlers integrated culturally with the local populations. Some regions included in the Punjab during the colonial period, especially Dera Ghazi Khan, remained dominated by the Baloch ethnicity. Once the question of re-demarcating boundaries came about, political elites should have calmly began to examine existing boundaries and begun consulting local populations on the new boundaries to be drawn. However, perhaps for lack of experience, the process has produced more antagonism than reconciliation amongst the diverse populations of the region. An MNA from Mianwali told the National Assembly, “Mianwali should not be made a colony of South Punjab.” While one may ask the gentlemen in question as to why Mianwali was happy at being a colony of (Western) Punjab, the real point is that the process has been mismanaged to the extreme.

Especially cynical is the promise by Abdur Qadir Gilani to start a long march to Lahore if the PML-N opposes the creation of the BJP province. The Gilani family may be best advised to drive to their family home in DHA, Lahore, where the young Gilani was schooled. The move may be to ensure the political families who have moved to Lahore that they are still able to win elections in the Multan and Mianwali belt. The Gilani family, the Qureshi family, the Khosa family and Imran Khan, all now live in Lahore. This could produce a strange situation if a member of one of these families is elected chief minister or governor of the new province.

While one has to accept and be open to the fact that the boundaries of the Punjab have continued to shift across history and that there is a need, both administrative and more fundamental, to create a new province in the Punjab, one fails to see how the current attempt to rush through the proposal shall deliver the promised province.

While the current PPP-led proposal attempts to make both Multan and Bahawalpur centres of power in the new province, the PML-N’s decision to boycott the NA committee in the first place does not bode well for the possibility that a new province is actually carved out before the current assemblies are dissolved within the next month and a week.

If nothing else: the March 15 deadline for dissolving the National Assembly is an indicator that the current proposal is merely an attempt to use the Seraiki province issue as an electoral gambit. On one side, there is no realistic possibility of the creation of a new province before the deadline; on the other, if elected assemblies are serious about attempting to split Punjab as their way of saying ‘goodbye’, then it is certainly a recipe for disaster.

With the genuine need for a Seraiki province being trivialised on the eve of the next general elections, it appears best that it be left aside until the electoral storm withers.

The writer is the general secretary (Lahore) of the Awami Workers Party. He is also a journalist and a researcher.