What Lies Behind Demands for a Separate Province in Pakistan's South Punjab.

The demand is rooted in the economic, political and cultural grievances of the people of the region.

The idea of reorganizing a state through the creation of new geographical and administrative units within it is not novel. Recent history provides examples of such ‘right-sizing’ of several states — one well-known to us is India, where several new provinces have been formed over the last seven decades. Is Pakistan also about to enter a phase of right-sizing itself with the creation of a province consisting of Punjab’s southern and southwestern parts?

The latest spurt for the new province came on April 9, 2018. When a new political entity, South Punjab, United Front came into being.

Is there a historical context to the movement for reorganizing Punjab? Has Pakistan moved beyond its well-entrenched paradigm of an overly centrist state which views every ethnonationalism demand for territorial restructuring through the prism of security? Will the creation of a new geographical and administrative unit in Punjab led to the creation of other new provinces as well?

South Punjab witnessed the emergence of two competing political trends in 1970: a Bahawalpur-based movement centered on the demand for restoring the geographical and administrative boundaries of Bahawalpur state that had been merged into One Unit in 1955 and a Multan-centered, a linguistic-nationalist movement for the creation of a province comprising those districts of Punjab where Seraiki - language is spoken. 

The former movement was premised on the contention that Bahawalpur, one of the most prosperous princely states at the time of independence, had suffered a steep economic and political decline after its merger with One Unit. A litany of complaints about developmental deprivations, administrative neglect, and oppressive centralization of power in Lahore led to public demands for the restoration of the state when One Unit came to an end in 1970. These demands received a strong impetus through street agitations in Bahawalpur in April that year that also resulted in the death of some protestors at the hands of law enforcement agencies – giving the movement its first ‘martyrs’. A political organization spearheading the demands for the restoration of the state of Bahawalpur, United Front. It enjoyed such widespread support at the time that it won four National Assemblies and nine Punjab assemblies seats from the Bahawalpur region in the 1970 general elections.

All this mobilization soon subsided and its proponents either joined mainstream parties or they disappeared from the political scene altogether.

In recent decades, political discourse in south Punjab has tilted in favor of an identity movement based on the Seraiki language. It has its origin in literary activism that began in 1960 when the development of the Seraiki script and the widespread availability of printing technologies made it possible to mass publish books and journals written in the Seraiki language.

A highly important milestone in the evolution of a Seraiki consciousness was a Seraiki literary conference held in Multan in 1975. Literary, social and political activists of the region who participated in the event decided to work for the official recognition of their language. Their efforts were rewarded in the 1981 census when the speakers of Seraiki were allowed, for the first time, to have it recorded as their mother tongue.

The 1980s marked the transition of Seraiki's activism from a literary movement to a political one. Thus began the quest for a distinct region and some parties, such as Pakistan Seraiki Party, emerged to mobilize public support for a separate Seraiki province. 

The case for a Seraiki province has been well-presented since then by researchers, writers and poets.

The demand for the creation of a new province in south Punjab is rooted in the economic, political and cultural grievances of the people of the region. By all objective accounts, the districts of south Punjab rank far behind those from the north and central Punjab in social and economic indicators. Seraiki civil society complains about the persistent neglect of its region by the throne of Lahore. Non-compliance with the regional job quota for south Punjab and the lack of suitable allocation of the development budget for the region are cited, among many other things, as major justifications for the division of Punjab. These arguments have some merit: the government’s general performance in south Punjab shows how distant the state is from the people living in this region.

Then there is something else.

The 2017 Census placed Punjab’s population at approximately 110 million. If the province were a country, it would be the 12th most populated state in the world. The demand for its geographical and administrative reorganization is rooted in the argument that it is not always possible to have effective administrative and governance structures to deliver civic services to such a vast population.

The passage of the 18th Constitutional Amendment in 2010, which saw an unprecedented transfer of power from the center to the provinces, is also an important development as far as the quest for a Seraiki province is concerned. The powers gained by the provinces under the amendment produced an instant reaction among ‘minorities’ within each of them. Urdu speakers in Sindh, Hindko-speakers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Push tuns in Balochistan, and Seraiki speakers in Punjab all demanded provinces of their own.

Thus began the latest stage in the territorial imagining of the Seraiki movement: a Seraiki province increasingly looked like a distinct possibility. It was under these circumstances in 2012 that the National Assembly and the Punjab Assembly passed resolutions in support of the creation of new province(s) in Punjab. These resolutions were passed even though there were open differences both within PPP and PMLN, ruling in Islamabad, and Lahore respectively at the time, over whether there should be one new province or two in south Punjab – or none at all.

The debate about right-sizing, or rather downsizing, Punjab subsequently came to the forefront of electoral politics as PPP embarked in 2013 on a proactive voter mobilization around the demand for a Saraiki province. The politics of province-making, however, did not affect the party’s electoral fortunes, and it was routed in south Punjab, winning only one National Assembly seat from the entire region.

Pakistan Punjab Province Credit: Reuters.

Together, these developments have generated an unprecedented optimism about the possibility of a Seraiki province becoming a reality.

Will this optimism translate into policy?

In neighboring India, the creation of new provinces is a relatively easy affair – at least on paper. The central legislature approves the creation of a new province through a simple majority of its members, even though the constitution requires it to have a (non-binding) consultation with the concerned state’s legislature too.

In Pakistan, Article 239 of the Constitution sets the bar extremely high when it comes to the creation of new provinces. Changes in the boundaries of existing federating units require a constitutional amendment that, in turn, needs a two-thirds majority in the two houses of the federal legislature. What makes the changes even more difficult is that they also need to be endorsed by a two-thirds majority in the provincial legislature of the concerned unit. The creation of such a large-scale political and constitutional consensus is a tall order by any standard.

The Pakistani federation is also essentially a demos-enabling mechanism where federal institutions structured around the size of the population, such as the National Assembly, remain far more empowered than those that are based on equal representation of the federating units regardless of their population – such as the senate. This means that Punjab, having the highest number of representatives in the National Assembly, possesses an overriding legislative strength to thwart any move to divide it.

Will the whole effort for a Seraiki province, thus, flounder under the heavy weight of these requirements? Will all the latest developments merely end up making Multan a secondary capital of Punjab to better administer the southern and southwestern parts of the province? Will the linguistic/nationalistic ambitions of the Seraiki-speaking people be satisfied with any arrangement short of a province of their own?