More provinces will not make Pakistan safer

The idea of creating new provinces has resurfaced in Pakistan at a moment when the state is fighting resurgent terrorism and an unstable economy. Supporters argue that smaller units would improve governance and bring power closer to local communities. Critics warn that the proposal would sharpen ethnic divisions and pull attention away from the security crisis. The critics have the better case.

Proposals now in circulation go as far as 12 new provinces, and all of them rest on a claim of administrative efficiency. But Pakistan’s problem has never been the size of its provinces. It has been the concentration of power at the center. In Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the state is already experienced as distant and extractive, and that perception is the ground on which grievance grows.

History suggests that redrawing borders does not by itself produce better governance. Pakistan has not lacked capacity at the provincial level. It has lacked the political will to devolve power. Creating new units while retaining central control over policing and security would be decentralization in name only, and it would deepen precisely the alienation that militant groups recruit from.

The suspicion attached to the current push is itself telling. There is no mass movement demanding new provinces. The demand is coming from the same political and economic elite that produced the elite capture it now promises to dismantle.

Pakistan’s ethnic and cultural diversity has long been described as unity in diversity. Dividing provinces along ethnic lines would turn that description into an administrative fact, which is closer to the imperial logic of divide and rule than to devolution. And even if such a division blunted sub-nationalist militancy, it would do nothing about religiously motivated terrorism, which recognizes no provincial boundary and operates comfortably across national ones.

Advocates point to India, which has gone from 14 states after the 1956 reorganization to 28 today. The comparison does not hold. India’s reorganization followed powerful linguistic movements and was managed through the States Reorganization Commission, a deliberative process with public legitimacy behind it. Nothing comparable is on offer here.

Creating new units while retaining central control over policing and security would be decentralization in name only.

Sanaullah Abbasi

The wider international record is mixed rather than encouraging. Nigeria moved from three regions at independence to 36 states in stages over three decades, partly to stop any single ethnic group from dominating. Representation widened, but so did patronage networks, and violence has recurred. Indonesia’s post-Suharto decentralization, including special autonomy arrangements, eased separatist pressure in some regions while creating fresh contests between provincial elites in others. Ethiopia’s ethnic federalism did the most damage, hardening ethnic claims into territorial ones and feeding inter-ethnic conflict and civil war. The pattern is consistent. Where national institutions are weak, ethnic territorialization is dangerous.

The current debate is not a response to terrorism. It is a diversion from the questions that actually determine whether terrorism can be contained: legitimacy, accountability, genuine devolution, and a political dialogue on alienation in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the neglected districts of Sindh and Punjab.

Terrorism does not respect borders, and it cannot be contained by drawing more of them. Sri Lanka devolved power to provincial councils and the war continued for two more decades. Where a political settlement has worked, as in Northern Ireland, it came through power-sharing and a negotiated agreement, not through the creation of new administrative units.

The constitution permits provinces to be redrawn, but the threshold is deliberately high: a two-thirds resolution from the provincial assembly concerned, followed by two-thirds majorities in both houses of parliament. That difficulty is a safeguard, not an obstacle. The history of the 1950s is a reminder of why. The One Unit scheme, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1954, and the Federal Court’s validation of that dissolution the following year on a technicality about the Governor General’s assent together established a pattern. Ayesha Jalal called what grew out of it a political economy of defense. This proposal belongs to the same tradition: geographical engineering pursued in bad faith and justified by manufactured uncertainty.

None of this is an argument against ever creating a new province. Individual cases can be debated and decided on their merits, by consensus, on demonstrated administrative need, and with the aspirations of the people concerned taken seriously. The test is whether a proposal produces cohesion or division.

A badly conceived or badly executed reorganization would strengthen the very forces it claims to contain. The better path is to rebuild governance where people actually live. Pakistan’s megacities should be governed as metropolitan units in practice and not only on paper, judged on welfare and service delivery rather than on the size of the map. The country has swung from One Unit to a demand for a dozen provinces without once fixing what lies underneath.

Article 5 of the constitution makes loyalty to the state the basic duty of every citizen. Part II sets out what the state owes in return: life, liberty, dignity, property. Those two obligations were written as a single bargain, and only one half of it has ever been enforced. The real question is not how many provinces Pakistan has. It is whether the state intends to keep its side.

-Dr. Sanaullah Abbasi is former IGP of Gilgit and former DG of the FIA. He is currently visiting faculty in SZABIST University in Karachi.