Pakistan keeps redrawing the blueprint. It never finishes the building.

One Unit would end provincial rivalries. Basic Democracies would bring government closer to the people. Presidential systems would provide stability. Parliamentary systems would restore democracy. Military governments would eliminate corruption. Civilian governments would consolidate constitutionalism. Local governments would bypass provincial elites, until they were dismantled, then rediscovered by the next government as though they had never existed. 

Pakistan has spent most of its existence redrawing itself. 

We have a rather odd habit in this country. Whenever the state disappoints us, we begin looking for another state. Not another government, or another party, but another arrangement altogether. Another map. Another constitutional formula. Another administrative design. Our greatest political faith has never been in good governance. It has been in the hope that the next system will finally succeed where the last one failed. 

Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s remarks last week belong to that long tradition. Declaring that the present system has “collapsed”, he urged political parties to settle the question of new provinces and administrative units. Whether one agrees with him or not is almost beside the point. Democracies should be able to debate provincial boundaries, just as they debate electoral reforms or constitutional amendments. 

What is unsettling is something else entirely. 

It is hearing one of the country’s most powerful ministers speak as though he were diagnosing the state from outside it. 

There is an old temptation in Pakistan to confuse reinvention with reform. We redraw the blueprint because repairing the building is harder. We move the walls because fixing the plumbing is slow, technical and unremarkable. Structural change promises history. Administrative competence promises only functioning institutions. 

None of those redesigns was without logic. Many had sincere advocates. Some may even have contained the seeds of useful reform. Yet history has left us with an uncomfortable question: have our failures really been constitutional, or have they been administrative? 

Countries rarely become successful because they stumble upon the perfect constitutional arrangement. They succeed because institutions are allowed to mature, policies outlast governments, and the ordinary machinery of the state works with sufficient competence that citizens barely notice it. The passport is issued. The land record exists. The police register the complaint. The budget is implemented. None of this is glamorous. All of it is statecraft. 

It is hearing one of the country’s most powerful ministers speak as though he were diagnosing the state from outside it. 

Muna Khan

That is why there is an unmistakable irony in the present debate. 

Naqvi is not an academic writing from the sidelines or an opposition politician diagnosing a government he does not control. He is the Interior Minister of Pakistan. If the system has collapsed, then he occupies one of the very offices responsible for keeping it standing. 

Defense Minister Khawaja Asif’s response was telling precisely because it was not a rejection. He said he broadly shared Naqvi’s assessment of the system. His objection was to the venue. If the republic requires fundamental reform, then parliament exists, and the cabinet exists, and Naqvi sits in both. These are not inconveniences to be spoken around; they are the constitutional forums through which such questions acquire democratic legitimacy. Two senior ministers can agree that the system has failed and still disagree about where that conversation belongs. The disagreement about the forum is the more revealing one. 

Asif made another point that deserves attention. Much of the National Action Plan remains the responsibility of the Interior Ministry. Whatever one thinks of that claim politically, it illustrates a larger truth. Pakistan has no shortage of unfinished reforms already sitting on government shelves. Before embarking on another constitutional experiment, it is reasonable to ask why so many existing responsibilities remain only partially fulfilled. 

This is not an argument against new provinces. The case for them is not frivolous. A province of well over a hundred million people may genuinely be beyond the reach of any provincial secretariat, and the demand for South Punjab has had serious political backing for decades. Pakistan may one day conclude that its federation requires more administrative units, and that would be a legitimate constitutional conversation. But if new provinces are presented as the solution before we have demonstrated that existing institutions can govern effectively, we risk mistaking geography for governance. 

That has been our oldest political illusion: that our problems lie in the blueprint rather than in the builders. 

States are not rescued by half-finished ideas unveiled from podiums. They are strengthened by governments willing to do the slower, less celebrated work of governing well, consistently, within the constitutional framework they already possess. 

It is not as exciting as promising a new system. It is simply how functioning states are made. 

—Muna Khan is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.

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