The federation of Pakistan will survive only if contented provinces stand by it.

The unprecedented surge created by the lawyers’ protest seems to have all but petered out with Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry going back to his court and Shahbaz Sharif to the chief minister’s office.
It should have gone much further than that. Perhaps it is for the first time in Pakistan that a newly installed government backed by a parliamentary majority has been forced to retreat in the face of an advancing mob. In the normal course of events Aitzaz Ahsan should have taken his grievance to court and Nawaz Sharif, whose party later joined the lawyers to impart greater vigour to the movement, should have taken his to parliament. By taking to the streets, the bar and the PML-N quite unexpectedly released the forces of popular discontent in a way that resembled a revolution.
Having achieved their immediate aims, the lawyers and politicians are back to their homilies and bargains while wider, more serious issues of concern must wait another day for a larger and more intimidating display of people’s power.
While the achievement of March 16 cannot be downplayed it must be said that the direct beneficiaries of that day’s cavalcade have only included the privileged class (judges and lawyers) and people hailing from a part (central Punjab) of the country. In this case, there doesn’t appear to be any fundamental objection to the country’s constitutional scheme nor to the manner in which political power and economic resources are shared by the federation and the provinces. The demand for radical changes is from other classes and regions.
Most persistent is the demand for the transfer of functions from the federation to the provinces. The main theatre of agitation is believed to be indifferent or even averse to it because it hosts the federal government, and the political and bureaucratic elite of the region dominates it. Resultantly, even the constitutional commitment to transfer the subjects on the concurrent list to the provinces within a specified period remains unfulfilled.
It is ironical that while the consistent provincial demand has been for greater powers it is the centre that has been growing stronger — not just at the cost of the provinces but of local councils as well. The denial of power is felt more acutely in Balochistan than in the other provinces. The rebellious youth and tribal chiefs of Balochistan spurned a recent presidential offer of a substantial development grant as their struggle, they contend, is for control over their own resources and not for largesse from the very people who usurped these resources.
The nationalists of Sindh and Balochistan (as the champions of provincial rights have come to be known) are in the political vanguard that has long been asking for a new compact in which the constituent units decide what powers they should surrender to the federation, because in terms of the Lahore Resolution of 1940, it is they who were to be ‘sovereign and autonomous’. The Baloch sardars go a step further and insist that they must be governed by the treaty of accession.
Mumtaz Bhutto and other nationalists of Sindh are prepared to part with no more than defence, foreign affairs, communications and currency. An assembly of constitutional lawyers, political scientists, economists and human rights activists recently brought together by Dr Mubashir Hasan (a founding ideologue of Bhutto’s PPP) is inclined to expand the list of subjects to include foreign trade, income tax, citizenship and immigration. Surely, that much the present generation of politicians must do instantly and without reservation to make Pakistan, as the authors of the 120-page monograph have put it, a tenable state. Its present constitutional structure, they hold, has made it untenable as it is being ‘run wholly by Islamabad’.
Dr Mubashir’s monograph contains many other suggestions for the country’s tenability in a historical background but its crux — more power to the provinces — can be implemented without delay. The ‘nationalists’ still wouldn’t be satisfied but surely it would assuage their anger, and even the Baloch rebels might feel persuaded to come down from the hills if the control of oil and gas fields is given to the provinces.
Next to the doctrine of jihad which political leaders and the army generals propounded in the 1980s and then backed by training and arming tribal militias, it is the concentration of all power at the centre that has fostered extremism and insurgency in the country. The Baloch insurgents are certainly not religious extremists. As an ethnic group they are secular in outlook and behaviour. It would be a pity if government policies and foreign intervention drive them to make common cause with the Taliban.
The central idea of President Obama’s new ‘comprehensive strategy’ is to make the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan a single theatre of US-Nato military operations. The American commanders have left no doubt that the theatre includes Balochistan. The real threat to the US that congressmen and commanders repeat so often comes from Pakistan. When it is all one theatre the battle will recognise no boundary up in the air or on the ground. Centcom chief Gen Petraeus has already said that he would take the fight to the insurgents wherever they may be.
In a broadening campaign, our government wouldn’t be able, even if it were willing, to stop American troops from crossing the border. And for them to cross into Balochistan would be much easier. That would radicalise that province and make it as lawless as Baitullah Mehsud’s Waziristan. Imagine, not long ago a traveller, by day or by night, had to worry about his safety elsewhere in the country but not in the wilds of Balochistan.
While the monograph talks of Pakistan’s tenability, the American strategists have already declared it a state that is ‘hovering close to the brink of collapse’. By giving $7.5bn over seven years for development and another $2.5bn for armed combat, it is the Americans who will decide whether or not it should fall over the brink. No neighbour or distant well-wisher or Islamic bloc would then speak for us. The federation will survive only if contented provinces stand behind it. Presently they do not. It is up to Islamabad and the military to fight or give up.

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