More Provinces?
By Dr Ismat Kamal
Dublin , CA
“Woe unto the nation that is split into numerous fragments,
Each fragment considering itself to be nation!”
- Khalil Gibraan
The renaming of the NWFP has lead to protest marches and riots, and the country is simmering with resentment and in-house fighting. There is a demand for more provinces, and every small group of people feels entitled to have a province of its own. Clearly, more provinces are needed. The most sensible suggestion has come from Mian Shahbaz Sharif, who has admitted the need for more provinces, but has said that the new provinces should be based on administrative rather than linguistic divisions.
One of the biggest impediments to progress and development in Pakistan has been its apparent conversion into a multi-national state, with its major components at loggerheads. The poet, humorist and humanist, Ibn-e-Insha, had lamented that in Pakistan there is a Sindhi nation, a Punjabi nation, a Bengali nation (alas!), all kinds of nations except a Pakistani nation. The concept of multiple nationalities within one country is a negation of the two-nation theory on which Pakistan was founded. Its logical conclusion is civil war or disintegration, as we have seen in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, and as we learnt to our own dismay in the case of Bangladesh.
The best way to get rid of the evil of multiple nationalities in Pakistan is to remove the ethnic connotation from the administrative divisions of the country. The Quaid-i-Azam had described the existing demarcation and the consequent provincialism as “a relic of the old administration”. He had said, “We are now all Pakistanis – not Baluchis, Pathans, Sindhis, Bengalis, Punjabis and so on … and we should be proud to be known as Pakistanis and nothing else”. (Quaid-i-Azam Speaks, June 15, 1948, p. 156, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of Pakistan, 1950).
The re-demarcation of provincial boundaries should be based on administrative divisions small enough so that democracy can be felt at the grassroots. Such a delineation already exists in the form of the twelve former divisions of West Pakistan under One Unit. The writer remembers with nostalgia how a sense of one-ness had begun to emerge in West Pakistan during the days of One Unit. One Unit failed because of the fear of domination by the Punjab. A setup where 60 per cent of the population lives in one province is unwieldy, and is bound to raise feelings of insecurity in the smaller provinces (in contrast, the population of California, the most populous state in the USA, is only about 15% of the country’s population). Many of the political squabbles in Pakistan have emerged because of meddling by the federal government to enforce its party’s rule in Punjab.
Restoring the former Divisions of West Pakistan – Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Sargodha, Multan, Bahawalpur, Quetta, Kalat, Khairpur, Karachi and Hyderabad (as shown in the accompanying map) – as provinces would avoid ethnic controversies and hassles. Each of the twelve divisions has enough resources to develop and prosper. For example, the two divisions of Baluchistan, considered to be the most disadvantaged, have Sui Gas, over which they should be given full control, and a long coastline, which could be developed with port cities and tourist resorts.
The new demarcation would not detract from the cultural heritage of any ethno-linguistic group, which did not suffer any cultural shock when the Hindu component was withdrawn in 1947, or when the groups lived together under One Unit for 15 years. The present setup legitimizes ethnic divisions, and results in problems such as the Kalabagh Dam issue to be viewed from the parochial point of view.
The new provinces should have the right to impose and collect their own taxes and spend the revenues within their own boundaries. As in the USA, government and taxes should be at three levels: municipal or district, state and federal. This will avoid squabbles which invariably occur over the allocation and release of funds by the federal government under the NFC awards.
From recent history, we have two examples of administrative divisions within a federal setup: the former Soviet Union, where the divisions were based on “nationalities”, and the United States, where the states are based on common-sense administrative divisions, with boundaries generally made up of straight lines. The Soviet Union disintegrated, while the USA is one of the most stable democracies in the world. If Pakistan is to prosper, all talk of nations and nationalities apart from the Pakistani nation must stop, and all provisions which lead to the perpetuation of such ideas must be abolished.
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