PAKISTAN is still running on a 1970 administrative map with four provinces, but the country was six crores then and is touching twenty-five crores now. The cities have exploded, problems have changed, but the system is the same, and that is why the gap between the state and the people keeps growing. The demand for new provinces from South Punjab, Bahawalpur, Hazara is not a manifesto of any party, it is a public need. A farmer in Rajanpur, a student in Bahawalpur, a shopkeeper in Hazara, all say the same thing – they have to travel three hundred kilometers to Lahore or Peshawar for a small file work. People are tired of it.
In this debate, Mohsin Naqvi has not stepped back, he has become silent, and there is a big difference between the two. Anyone who has actually run Punjab knows that such big reforms are not made with daily press statements. His thinking is very clear and far-sighted, he does not make it a fight of whether the federation will allow it or whether the provincial assembly will pass it. He sees it as what the people need on the ground, and people do need closer government. Governments come and go, public need stays.
But Sindh is a special case and it has to be handled differently, which is what I called the Sindh Model in my last article. In Punjab or KP, the demand is mostly administrative, but in Sindh it is historical and emotional. Sindh is not just an administrative unit, it is a five-thousand-year-old civilization from Mohenjo-daro to Shah Latif, and whether someone speaks Sindhi or Urdu there, he is part of the same cultural fabric. If you raise the same slogan of division in Sindh as in South Punjab, people will immediately see it as a conspiracy and the whole case for new provinces will be damaged. That is why Sindh needs the Sindh Model.
Sindh Model does not mean breaking Sindh, it means strengthening Sindh from within while keeping its constitutional unity intact. Its practical shape is to make its divisions – Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Larkana, Mirpurkhas, Shaheed Benazirabad – fully empowered with their own development budget, their own secretariat for education, health, revenue and local police matters, letting the tax of Karachi be spent visibly in Karachi and royalty of Sukkur and coal income of Thar be spent on its own people.
This will remove the fear of division and also give the administrative justice people are asking for. This is where Naqvi’s silence makes sense. He understands that if you use one stick for every region, you will lose Sindh. A typical politician shouts the same slogan everywhere, but a person who understands administration speaks according to the psychology of each region, and that is a more durable way of building consensus. Today the public is quite clear, people in South Punjab openly demand a province, Hazara has a long movement, Bahawalpur has a resolution for restoration, and in Sindh people demand powers and fair share.
Different words, same demand – bring government closer to us. So the way forward is not to make it a fight between Islamabad and provincial capitals. For most regions a new province is the direct answer, for Sindh the answer is the Sindh Model which keeps unity and also provides justice, and people who focus quietly on public service and administrative improvement are often the ones who create space for a workable and accepted solution.
—The writer is former Regional Executive Inclusive Development at NBP, Mirpur AK.
