Long division

The Punjab chief minister, rather unexpectedly, has made what he says is a ‘personal’ statement on the growing calls for more provinces to be created in the country by carving them out of Punjab. While Shahbaz Sharif has said that his brother will put forward the formal party line, he has also said that if Punjab is to be bifurcated, the same should happen in Sindh, with Karachi and its population of over six million turned into a separate province as well. This seems like rather a tit-for-tat suggestion to an issue that has nothing to do with notions of revenge. Turning Karachi into a province – or, in fact, a kind of urban city state – seems to be neither practical nor desirable. For one, such a move would remove from the rest of Sindh its main port, while there is also no real demand for Karachi to be separated in this fashion. All major parties with a strong standing in the province — the PPP, the MQM, the ANP and the Sindh nationalist parties — have immediately rejected the move.

This is in major contrast to the situation in Punjab. While the PML-N sees the call for the separate province of Seraikistan to be created as a move by the PPP and the MQM to cut into its vote bank in the province where it holds most strength, it cannot deny the fact that the demand for a separate Seraiki province has existed for years, and is based around cultural and lingual factors which distinguish the region from the rest of Punjab. Furthermore, south Punjab does not fare well in terms of funding allocations, and that perhaps explains its backwardness compared to the central and northern districts of the province. For administrative reasons too, creating new, smaller units may not be an unwise move; it could conceivably bring many benefits and also even out the sense of dominance felt in the three smaller units vis-a-vis Punjab. This factor has, through the decades of the country’s existence, had much impact on harmony. The PML-N, as a party which takes pride in its patriotism, should also consider these factors and think beyond the narrow issues of electoral politics or the question of conspiracies it seems to believe are being hatched against it.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 26^th, 2011.