Editorial Desk
Governments that want better public services rarely begin by looking for ways around the people whose consent the law requires. Yet the debate over dividing four provinces into 12 has already moved on from whether to do it to how to get past some provinces.
The administrative argument deserves respect, and it is not the weak point. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said on Sunday that power and money stop at Lahore, Karachi, Quetta and Peshawar, and that local governments depend on those capitals for both and never get them. Hardly anyone who has watched Pakistan’s cities struggle would dispute it. Nor is the principle exotic. The PPP, the PML-N and the MQM have each championed new provinces at different times and for different reasons, and Asif has a point when he accuses the PPP of backing a Saraiki province in Punjab while resisting division everywhere else. So the question is not whether Pakistan may redraw its internal map. It is who is holding the pen, and what the lines are for.
The idea did not come from parliament, or from a politician who had spent years arguing for it. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said at the end of July that the governance system had collapsed and called for a reset. A day later, the military’s spokesman endorsed a debate on an “administrative reset”, linking governance to national security. Proposals like this tend to surface from the establishment whenever the country faces a financial crunch. Civilian ministers carry the message, but the sponsorship is hard to mistake.
The map itself is revealing, because the cuts fall in telling places. Punjab, the PML-N’s base, would be divided four ways, into West Punjab, South Punjab, Bahawalpur and Potohar. Sindh, the PPP’s, would be split in two, separating Karachi and Lower Sindh from the north. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), where Imran Khan’s PTI dominated until October and which now lives under emergency and governor’s rule, would be cut three or four ways. In Balochistan, coastal Makran, home to Gwadar, would be separated from the rest.
Ministers insist no province should be drawn along ethnic, linguistic or political lines. But dividing existing provinces will follow cultural fault lines whatever anyone calls it, and nearly every line also lands on a rival’s stronghold or a strategic asset. That may be coincidence. The plan’s authors have done little to show that it is.
Then there is the money. Some suspect the exercise will be shelved once its first item, a revision of the National Finance Commission (NFC) Award, is secured. New provinces create new expenditure claims and force the formula to be reopened, which makes the two projects hard to separate. A 28th Amendment could loosen the constitutional floor on the provincial share of the divisible pool, though no draft has been tabled. The military has long resented the 18th Amendment’s settlement, and smaller provinces would bargain more weakly and lean harder on Islamabad. There is a more mundane motive too: new provinces mean new security and administrative roles, and with them relief for promotion bottlenecks. The plan’s defenders will reject all of this. But nobody has offered a rival account of why reform of the map arrives bundled with a revision of the pool.
Nor has anyone explained how it would be paid for. The core administrative structure of a new province is Rs22.4bn to Rs25.9bn a year. Multiply that by the eight additional provinces in the 12-province plan and the bill runs to roughly Rs180bn to Rs207bn annually, with small units watching those costs swallow large shares of their NFC allocations. The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord covers four provinces, not 12, and provincial debts, federal loans and sums the Centre owes the provinces would all have to be apportioned. A reform sold as housekeeping has so far produced no housekeeping.
None of this would matter if the constitution allowed the plan to proceed regardless. It does not. Article 239(4) bars a bill that alters a province’s limits unless that province’s assembly passes it by two-thirds of its total membership. The bill also needs two-thirds in both houses of parliament. Because the plan divides all four provinces, all four assemblies must consent, and Sindh has already refused. Its assembly passed a resolution in early September rejecting any division.
That is why the conversation has turned to bypasses, and why the bypasses say more than the map. The first is a nationwide referendum, envisaged ahead of a 28th Amendment in the first half of 2027, with the new map taking effect only after the 2029 election. But under Article 48(6), only the prime minister can ask a joint sitting of parliament to approve one, and Rana Sanaullah, the PML-N politician who advises the prime minister, said in September that it could be held only with that approval. A “yes” vote would add legitimacy but no legal power over a provincial assembly. Supporters will say that asking citizens is more democratic than yielding to a provincial veto. Yet Article 239(4) exists precisely to stop a national majority redrawing a province against its own representatives. And Pakistan’s only national referendums, in 1984 under General Zia-ul-Haq and in 2002 under General Pervez Musharraf, were held while the constitution was in abeyance and without parliament’s consent. The record does not recommend the instrument.
The second is to amend Article 239 itself and drop provincial consent. That needs two-thirds in both houses, and legislators across party lines in Sindh have opposed such a move before, when the MQM proposed deleting the clause.
The third is the courts. The new Federal Constitutional Court is expected to supply cover, ruling that the collective will of the public outweighs a provincial veto. No such ruling exists and nobody has said it is planned. But when commentators are already discussing which court will rescue a plan, it has stopped being a policy proposal.
The fourth is pressure on the PPP itself: efforts to engineer a “forward bloc” within the party, and the threat of Governor’s Rule in Sindh. After what has happened in KP, that threat is no longer an abstraction. A reform that needs this much machinery around it is not winning its argument on the merits.
The parliamentary arithmetic does not help. The PML-N cannot reach two-thirds alone. The PPP is reluctant, and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari called on 28 October for the debate to end. Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s JUI-F is a wild card, and for now too anti-establishment to be counted on. The PML-N’s own position is revealing. Sanaullah called the debate premature, yet conceded that if people wanted new provinces no one could stop it. The party, or rather the prime minister’s extended family, has accepted a four-way split of Punjab, but only after the 2029 election, so that it can govern a united province for the current term. Neither the PML-N nor the PPP wants to lose a stronghold, and only a PTI without Imran Khan might support the plan.
That pattern is the sharpest argument against the proposal. Everyone is willing to divide, so long as the cost falls on someone else, or later. The PTI warns that rushing to divide a volatile border province would fracture the state. Baloch nationalists see Islamabad’s divide-and-rule, with Gwadar and mineral wealth as the prize. Only a marginalised MQM-P, which has renewed its demand for new units in Sindh, pulls the other way.
What both camps can agree on is local government. Asif’s central complaint is that money stops in provincial capitals, yet Article 140-A, added by the 18th Amendment, already requires provinces to create local governments. They largely did not, and devolving power to the local level matters more than creating new provinces. If the diagnosis is right, the cure is already written into the constitution. It requires no referendum, no amendment of Article 239, no court’s blessing and no Rs180bn a year.
The test is simple, and it comes before any map. If the establishment’s concern is service delivery, it can make the provinces honour Article 140-A and see what changes in the districts. If it hears Sindh’s refusal, treats it as a constitutional answer and takes the argument back to parliament, the country has a debate. If it goes looking for a referendum, a court or a “forward bloc” to overcome that answer, then everyone will know what the exercise was for.
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