By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: A proposal by Pakistan’s interior minister to tear up the country’s administrative map has plunged the governing coalition into open disagreement, drawn a blunt rebuff from the chief minister of Sindh, and prompted lawyers in Lahore to accuse the minister of proposing something the constitution does not allow.
Mohsin Naqvi told the Pakistan Economic Summit in Islamabad on Thursday that the system of governance under which the country was run had, in his words, collapsed, and that no meaningful progress could be made without carving the four existing provinces into a larger number of smaller administrative units. He called on political parties to come together and resolve the question once and for all, telling delegates that without structural change the same arguments would still be running a decade from now.
The minister argued that smaller units would bring government closer to ordinary citizens, and that the country needed a new generation of leaders. Pakistan’s youth, he said, wanted merit-based jobs and access to justice rather than stipends and laptops.
The remarks have set off a chain reaction across the political and legal establishment, exposing fault lines not only between the government and its coalition partner but within the government’s own ranks.
PPP sends the question to its top decision-making body
The Pakistan Peoples Party, junior partner in the coalition led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, said the matter would go before its Central Executive Committee, the party’s senior policy-making forum — but only on the condition that any change follows the process set out in the constitution rather than being imposed by executive decree.
Nayyar Bokhari, the PPP’s secretary general, said the constitution set out a complete procedure for creating new provinces or altering provincial boundaries, and that this required a two-thirds majority in the relevant provincial assembly as well as in the National Assembly and the Senate. No new province, he said, could be brought into being by executive order.
He challenged the government to prove it was serious rather than simply raising the issue in public. If ministers genuinely wanted to create new provinces — including a long-discussed South Punjab — they should bring the matter to parliament and satisfy the constitutional requirements, he said, noting that a resolution calling for a South Punjab province was already sitting before the Punjab Assembly, in the province governed by the party that leads the coalition, Sharif’s PML-N.
Bokhari said ministers should first raise the issue in cabinet, after which the prime minister ought to consult PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, given what he called the national importance of the question. Only then, he said, would his party’s executive committee take up formal deliberations, with any eventual decision required to conform to the constitution, to democratic principle and to the will of the public.
Directing his response squarely at the interior minister, Bokhari said any argument that the system was not working should be made in parliament, not through statements to the media, and asked pointedly who ought to be held responsible if it were shown to be failing.
“A stereotype this land will not accept”
The sharpest rejection came from Sindh, one of Pakistan’s four provinces and long the most sensitive terrain for any talk of redrawing the map. Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah dismissed the proposal outright on Friday, telling reporters at Bhit Shah that he had seen Naqvi’s remarks about the system having collapsed but was not sure precisely what the minister meant.
Shah pointed out that the existing arrangement already spanned the political spectrum: Sharif as prime minister, the PML-N governing Punjab, his own PPP governing Sindh, a coalition running Balochistan, and the PTI in control of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. If the interior minister genuinely believed the system was beyond repair, he said, he should put forward concrete proposals rather than generalities. Naqvi had floated a number of ideas, the chief minister acknowledged, but this one — the creation of new provinces or administrative units — amounted to little more than “a stereotype which people of this mystic land will not accept.”
Lawyers call it unconstitutional; nationalists demand resignation
The Lahore High Court Bar Association went further, branding the interior minister’s comments unconstitutional outright. In a joint statement, association president Babar Murtaza, vice-president Sohail Qaiser Tarar and finance secretary Malik Ali Raza Khokhar accused those they held responsible for weakening the existing order of now proposing to replace it with a “new system” of their own design. The country’s progress and survival, they said, rested entirely on strict adherence to the constitution, the rule of law and a judiciary free of interference.
The bar leaders were also critical of the timing, arguing that the minister was inviting politicians to redesign the system of governance at a moment when, in their account, popular political figures and party workers remained jailed for long periods on what they characterised as fabricated charges. They called for the immediate release of all detained political workers and demanded that state institutions withdraw from political intervention so that constitutional supremacy and judicial independence could be restored.
In Sindh, the nationalist party Awami Tehreek was still more direct, accusing Naqvi of using the language of new provinces to disguise what it described as an attempt to divide Sindh, and calling on him to resign. In a joint statement, party president Vasand Thari and secretary general Sajid Hussain Mahesar said the minister, who they noted retained the backing of the PPP despite the party’s own objections to his proposal, had effectively become an unofficial spokesman for the security establishment on the question of new provinces, following in the footsteps of the MQM and sections of the media. He had, they said, forfeited any moral or political standing to continue serving as interior minister.
Defence minister: “hybrid system” here to stay
Further complicating the picture, Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif used a television appearance on Friday to defend what he termed the country’s “hybrid system” of governance, telling a private television channel that he did not believe the current arrangement would be brought to an end. The purpose of the hybrid system, he said, was to correct the mistakes of the past, and it remained, in his assessment, the only viable way forward.
Asif said there was no indication the current setup was about to be dismantled, but suggested that a small number of senior figures needed to meet to chart the way ahead — naming President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, and four or five other senior figures.
Asked whether the PPP’s support for the government, and the government’s relationship with state institutions, would hold, Asif acknowledged there were tensions between his party and the PPP, which he attributed to a reluctance on all sides to take responsibility for difficult decisions. All political parties had reached consensus on thirteen points, he said, yet only one institution — a reference to the military — had made sacrifices, while politicians occupied themselves criticising one another.
He drew a distinction between Naqvi’s remarks and a separate statement by the military’s chief spokesman, the director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations, saying the interior minister’s comments carried a political dimension the spokesman’s had not. He said he agreed with the ISPR’s characterisation that Naqvi’s remarks reflected a personal opinion, noting that the minister had himself been part of the governing arrangement for the past three and a half years.
Asif added that political governments were expected to take responsibility for resolving the country’s problems, yet were then accused of allowing the army to interfere whenever they handed it responsibility for internal, external or diplomatic matters — responsibility, he said, the army invariably discharged.
Cabinet colleagues divide over the plan
The cabinet’s own divisions were on further display as two other ministers spoke out in support of Naqvi’s proposal. Abdul Aleem Khan, the communications minister, issued a statement reaffirming his view that new administrative provinces represented what he called the ultimate key to strengthening democracy, reviving the economy and improving governance in Pakistan, a position he said he had held for some time given the country’s rapidly expanding population and administrative strain.
Khan set out a specific framework under which each of the four existing provinces — Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan — would be split into three administrative units apiece, styled North, Central and South, while retaining their existing provincial names and, he argued, their historic and cultural identities intact. Under the plan, offices such as the chief secretary, the inspector general of police and the high courts would operate within smaller, more manageable jurisdictions, allowing for what he described as more immediate and accountable administration. Moving the debate from slogan to implementation, he said, would not divide the country but strengthen national unity and ensure a fairer distribution of resources.
Federal Health Minister Mustafa Kamal offered similar backing, telling reporters at the opening of a private university that new administrative units would ease pressure on health services and other public systems, bringing decision-makers closer to the public and reducing the need for citizens to travel long distances to provincial capitals such as Lahore or Quetta. Smaller units, he argued, would mean faster service delivery, fairer distribution of resources and less bureaucratic delay in resolving local problems.
Constitutional lawyers: no provision exists for what is being proposed
As the political argument has intensified, legal experts have focused on a more fundamental question: whether the constitution permits what is being proposed at all.
Barrister Salahuddin Ahmed, a member of the Pakistan Bar Council, said the proposal looked politically unworkable given the depth of public feeling involved. Because creating new provinces would necessarily involve altering the boundaries of existing ones, he said, Article 239 would require a two-thirds majority not only in the relevant provincial assembly but in both the Senate and the National Assembly. He suggested that those pushing the plan might instead try to amend Article 239 itself to remove the requirement for provincial assembly approval altogether — and noted that following the recent 27th Constitutional Amendment, Article 239(5) now bars any court from questioning a constitutional amendment on any ground whatsoever, a change that would insulate such a manoeuvre from judicial review.
Former senator Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar said the country needed a genuine national debate on the merits of new provinces, but warned that raising so sensitive an issue through a government seen by many as lacking a public mandate, sitting alongside a National Assembly widely viewed as unrepresentative, made controversy inevitable — pointing out that even the government’s own coalition partners needle it over the disputed 2024 election results, still referred to in political shorthand as “Form 47.” He urged the government to hold free and fair elections and allow parties to set out their positions on new provinces in their manifestos, arguing that only a debate conducted on that basis would carry real meaning.
Former federal minister Fawad Chaudhry backed the principle of administrative devolution, calling it a step in the right direction, but warned that the issue carried a difficult history. He pointed to the 1911 partition of Bengal, the 1947 partition of Punjab and Bengal, and the creation and eventual abolition of the One Unit scheme as episodes whose consequences had lasted for decades. The concept itself was not the problem, he said; the difficulty lay in the detail — specifically, in how the establishment would secure the backing of political forces, nationalist movements in particular, for any such arrangement. That process, he warned, was fraught with risk and should not be entrusted to political figures who lacked the experience or public standing to manage it.
Ahsan Bhoon, head of the Independent Lawyers Group, voiced strong support for the creation of new provinces. A separate senior lawyer, cited without attribution in reporting on the issue, said a referendum held under Article 48(6) of the constitution could not be used to bypass the requirements of Article 239, and that any such proposal would still need to pass through parliament and secure constitutional approval in the normal way.
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