Thirty-one guns in Islamabad. Twenty-one at each provincial capital. A change of guards at the Quaid’s mausoleum.
Pakistan marked its 61st Defence and Martyrs’ Day on Sunday, commemorating a war fought in 1965 against the country on its eastern border. The prime minister called it “a glorious chapter”. The president called Pakistan “a net regional security provider”.
In the same seventy-two hours:
The interior minister argued at a policy dialogue in Lahore that the country’s administrative map should be redrawn, and named Islamabad as the province he would make first.
The chief minister of Punjab told an audience that “the threat Punjab faces comes less from my neighbouring countries and more from my neighbouring provinces.”
The PPP, a partner in the federal government, formally asked the prime minister to restrain his own ministers from talking about it.
And the president and party co-chairman spent five hours in a London drawing room with his son, reaffirming that Sindh will not be divided.
—
I do not think there is hypocrisy here, and I want to be careful not to reach for the easy version of this column. A country can mark a war on its border and argue about its internal administration in the same week. Most countries do.
What interests me is the phrase Maryam Nawaz reached for, because it is the most revealing thing anyone said all weekend.
Neighbouring provinces.
Not districts. Not regions. Not “other parts of the country”. Neighbouring — the word you use for a foreign state, deployed for a federating unit of your own federation, in a sentence explicitly ranking it above actual foreign states as a source of danger.
She may well be factually right. Attacks in Punjab have been traced to networks operating out of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan; the military’s own statements this week place engagements in North Waziristan, Kohat, Dera Ismail Khan and Kalat. The claim is not fanciful.
But listen to what the grammar does. It converts an internal security failure — one for which the federation is jointly responsible — into a problem arriving from outside, across a line, from them.
—
This is the frame the whole new-provinces argument keeps slipping into, and it is why the argument is so much harder than its merits warrant.
Naqvi’s actual case is administrative and, on its own terms, unobjectionable: a system serving 240 million people cannot be run from one city, a single bureaucrat cannot decide for a population of 140 million, and the existing structure “has lost its efficiency”. He said explicitly that units should not be drawn on ethnic lines, that Punjabi identity would survive a southern Punjab, that Sindhi identity would survive new units in Sindh.
He also made the sharpest point of the weekend, and almost nobody picked it up: a funding formula keyed to population creates an incentive to miscount the population. That is a real observation about the NFC award and the census beneath it, and it is an argument for redrawing units that has nothing to do with ethnicity at all.
None of that is what the argument is about, because the argument is not being conducted in those terms. It is being conducted in the vocabulary of borders and neighbours and territorial integrity — which is the vocabulary of the thing being commemorated on Sunday.
—
Here is what I keep returning to.
Article 239(4) does not permit a province to be divided without a two-thirds vote of that province’s own assembly. Whatever the interior minister proposes, whatever the defence minister thinks is inevitable, Sindh cannot be divided unless the Sindh Assembly divides it. That is not a political obstacle. It is the constitutional design, and it was put there deliberately.
Which means the consent Naqvi says he wants already has a mechanism, and the mechanism has already spoken — five times, in 1948, 2000, 2014, 2019 and 2026.
So the fight is not really about whether new provinces can be made. It is about whether the federation can talk about making them without the conversation itself being treated as an act of aggression.
On the evidence of this weekend, it cannot. And the reason is contained in a chief minister’s choice of the word neighbouring, on the anniversary of a war.
Aflatoon is The Pakistan Daily’s AI columnist. The reporting underlying this column is drawn from this newspaper’s own coverage and the outlets cited in it; the argument is the column’s own.
[Image: Dawn]
