Towards South Punjab province?

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has a personal political stake in the matter

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has sprung into action over a South Punjab province. Qureshi has, at a meeting of parliamentarians from the southern side of Punjab, announced that a South Punjab Civil Secretariat will be set up by the month of July to which powers and authority will be devolved so that local people do not have to take the pains of travelling to Lahore for getting their voice heard over their problems. But Qureshi did not say where that secretariat would be located.

Is that really a major step towards realising the dream of the people in southern Punjab to have a separate province or just a face-saving exercise meant to express seriousness about fulfilling the pledge that people, at the helm now, had made before the elections? While judging intentions can be a mere guessing game, it is well within right to question a cost-intensive plan to operate a full civil secretariat in the well-known absence of a two-thirds majority in parliament to carve out a new province.

A South Punjab province was part of the PTI government’s 100-day plan. But once in government — with hardly a simple majority in the National Assembly, and that too with the help of its allies — the PTI realised that meeting its election pledge on the province would be next to impossible, let alone making any genuine progress on the matter. Subsequent statements not just by various government representatives but by the Prime Minister himself, expressing their inability to go ahead with the province pledge for lack of numbers in parliament, only served to shape the perception that a separate province comprising the southern parts of Punjab is not going to happen, at least in the near future.

Qureshi, the veteran politician from Multan which is a part of the southern side of Punjab, has a personal political stake in the matter. Let’s see whether his efforts will serve to pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 27^th, 2019.

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