Politics of new provinces
Shahab Usto | Opinion | From the Newspaper

7th Feb 2012

THE movement for the creation of new provinces took a rather serious turn with the MQM recently introducing the 20th constitutional amendment bill in the National Assembly.

The bill seeks new provinces, which would be carved out from Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, by amending, inter alia, Article 239 that requires a tough “no less than two-thirds” majority in the provincial assembly of the province concerned.

The fact that the framers of the 1973 constitution had laid an almost insurmountable barrier to altering the provincial boundaries betrays a quest for structural certainty in the backdrop of the break-up of the state.

As a result, Balochistan, part Pakhtun, part Baloch, emerged as a new province but the overwhelmingly Seraiki-speaking Bahawalpur state was not revived as a province. Similarly, the old colonial structure in the northwest was left untouched.
However, the preservation of culture, script and language was ensured as a fundamental right.

Ironically, the constitution was soon amended by its civilian fathers and later a military ruler suspended it, creating again almost the same unitary and authoritarian state that had caused the secession of the eastern wing and the insurgencies in Balochistan. Structural certainty thus remained a distant dream.

The centrifugal forces, though fringe, kept violently challenging the state’s authority. As a result, years of authoritarian dispensations and civilian failures turned the state into a microcosm of ethnic and sectarian politics. Even mainstream parties are prey to ethnic appeals — though more to serve their short-term partisan interests.

The PPP is espousing the Seraikis but showing no such zeal for the Hazaras, to placate its coalition partner in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the ANP. The PML-N supports new administrative but not ethnic provinces lest ethnicity reduce its writ to central Punjab. Likewise, the PML-Q is happy to uphold the Hazara cause expecting more sympathy votes in the Hazara belt at the cost of the PML-N.

The MQM is vying for only the Hazara and Seraiki provinces probably because these communities have a sizeable presence in Karachi, a city whose ethnic configuration has increasingly changed with the influx of Pakhtuns during the last decade, endangering its ‘control’ over the city.

But the Sindhi nationalists see behind the MQM’s support for new provinces a ‘conspiracy’ to ultimately divide Sindh and carve out an Urdu-speaking province. The MQM’s arch rival in the city, the ANP, supports the nationalists, disregarding the wishes of its senior coalition partner PPP. The PPP in turn stands to lose both Sindhi votes and the Sindh card if it supports the bill. And if it doesn’t the coalition may come under new strain.

Given such deep-rooted political schisms and opportunism, restructuring the federation could prove a hazardous, if not destabilising, exercise. Moreover, the country’s conflict-resolution capacity is effete because of stunted institutions, civil-military tussles and internal and regional threats.

In any case, even the stability of an ethnically homogenous nation-state is no more dictated by the classical factors of a common land, race, culture and language. The European Union is not ethno-culturally homogenous. It emerged as a ‘super state’ for economic reasons and may well disintegrate for economic reasons.

The UK may also fall apart if Scotland votes for secession in the 2014 referendum. The political cohesion of socio-ethnically heterogeneous states, like ours, is more prone to economic determinism; they require both truly federal governance and social justice

And a true federation must cater to both subsidiarity and centrality. Subsidiarity is an organising principle that ensures decentralisation of powers and devolution of authorities to a representative hierarchical local, provincial and central structure.

Centrality is an enabling principle, which equips the central government with the powers required constitutionally to run the federation in letter and spirit. Then, an independent judiciary keeps the delicate dispersal of rights and duties among the state structures, ensuring the civil and public rights of citizens.

The ultimate aim, as Johannes Althusius (1557-1630), the father of modern federalism, says, is to “live together in mutual benevolence” for which the people enter into pactem foederis, secular agreements.

Neither size nor socio-cultural diversity ensures mutual benevolence. Alaska is more than 400 times larger than the smallest US state, Rhode Island.

Indeed, Alaska is bigger than Germany, France, the UK, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, Austria and Greece together; and the three US states — Alaska, Texas and California — constitute 30 per cent of the US. Yet, the US constitution is stringent, requiring the assent of both Congress and the state legislature for the creation or merging of states.

Canada, another successful federation is also not culturally homogenous. Its province, Quebec, is both Francophile and big. It is more than twice the size of France. Yet its people are content in the Canadian federation, voting negatively twice in the secessionist referendums.

But India’s constitution is very liberal. Articles 2, 3 and 4 allows parliament to create new states by simple legislation. No consent of the affected provinces is required; only their views are solicited on the proposed legislation. Therefore, a number of new states have been created since 1957 and the process is on.

Even then there are very big states in India. The UP by population is larger than Pakistan. More importantly, India is not a federal state but a union. It inherited a jumbled up colonial political landscape requiring legislative latitude to ‘unsnarl’ its underlying multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-classed layers, which it did using its much honed democratic implements.

Contrarily, Pakistan is a federal state with much weaker democratic institutions. Much of it comprises the parts that pre-existed it, and hence are inviolable under the compact of 1940.

Moreover, the smaller nationalities and cultural groups have tasted the bitter fruits of past political engineering in the form of One Unit, Basic Democracies or the recent local governments. Finally, the state is too embroiled in internal and external conflicts to undergo another dissection. Instead, we should go back to the original compact to heal the fissures, but only in a democratic way.

The writer is a lawyer.