The Seraiki province

We now have an elaborate bureaucratic setup as ‘champions of change’ in Punjab, as provincial autonomy comes under increasing attack. The promise to create ‘South Punjab’ in three months is substituted by yet another bureaucratic ‘mini-secretariat’ to be set up god knows where.

The continuing ineptness to deliver has finally delivered an elaborate bureaucratic model of governance in Punjab that would compensate for the rudderless government of Chief Minister Usman Buzdar. By clubbing provincial departments in seven groups, the posts of seven additional chief secretaries have been created, backed by all-powerful commissioners – for ‘good governance’.

Erasing the defining lines between the centre and the provinces, ministerial coordination committees consisting of federal and provincial ministers are to be created to manage the provincial subjects under the guidance of an omnipotent centre. This centre-led Punjab equation is to be extended to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where another chief minister awaits to be unburdened of his duties. With these measures, what is left of the provincial governments and cabinets in the two provinces run by the PTI?

On the other hand, as the centre plans to take over taxes being collected by the provinces, such as sales tax on services and agricultural tax, Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah has protested against this transgression over the provincial prerogative to collect taxes and has complained about the withholding of Sindh’s Rs104 billion share from the divisible pool. CM Shah has lamented the efforts of the federal government to take away the provincial government’s authority to collect taxes on agriculture, sales tax on goods and services and determining the value of property. The Sindh Assembly has also taken serious exception to the centre taking over three hospitals and the police being taken out of the sole domain of the provinces as the apex court redefines the concurrent list in a recent detailed judgment.

All these developments indicate that a silent and not so silent process is unleashed to interfere with the contours of the 18th Amendment. Failing to raise the tax-to-GDP ratio and cut down 20 federal divisions, the centre wants to reverse the current ratio of 57.5 percent for provinces – as compared to 42.5 percent for the centre – by seven percent for security and Fata. The differences between the federation and the provinces have risen so much that it would be too difficult to agree on the 9th NFC Award. Despite the horrible consequences of prolonged presidential rules, a sustained campaign is going on to bring back a vice-regal presidential system that refuses to accommodate the diversity of a federation consisting of federating units afraid of Punjabi domination.

The balancing act of creating a ‘South Punjab’ province, as promised by the PTI, PML-N and the PPP, by dividing the majority province to compensate for the deprivations of the Seraiki people is also being compromised at the altar of the politics of expediency. Afraid of losing its razor-thin majority in Punjab, the PTI is dragging its feet on its promise of a South Punjab province within three months, which was the condition that the PTI had accepted for the entry of the South Punjab Province Front in its fold. Now the contender of power within the PTI in Punjab has substituted the creation of another province with the creation of the ‘South Punjab Mini Secretariat’. This mini-secretariat is going to benefit 150 bureaucrats of 18 departments with lots of perks to alleviate their reservations to serve in the backyards of the south.

According to newspaper reports, a dispute has arisen over what is the suitable place for the South Punjab secretariat: the Punjabi Abadkars (settlers) are demanding that it be housed in Bahawalpur, in the hope of reviving the Bahawalpur state as another province; the bureaucrats and feudal landlords are vying for Multan; and the most influential Jehangir Tareen wants it in Lodhran, across the river from Bahawalpur. This tug of war is the beginning of the tussle over the capital of the new province.

The PML-N, which is basically a party of central Punjab, has also thrown a spanner in the works of a new province by reintroducing its two-province bill of South Punjab and Bahawalpur. A bill by the PPP on the creation of a Seraiki province is waiting deliberations on the record of parliament. Whenever the issue of a Seraiki province is raised to address the social and economic deprivations of its people, there are multiple forces that jump into the fray to frustrate the aspirations of one of our most deprived and exploited peoples.

In this, the most prominent are those who are proponents of the ‘ideology of Pakistan’, which by negating our multinational and multicultural diversity advocates an exclusionary unitarian centralised national entity on the basis of Muslim nationhood while at the same time subscribing to the Pan-Islamist notions of an Ummah. This group conceives a Muslim-majority country as an ‘Islamic state’ with one national language (Urdu) and faith as perceived by the ashraaf (elites) of the Muslim-minority provinces of northern India. While they are averse to keeping and creating provinces on the bases of ethnicity, culture and language, these supra-nationalists (read: aggressive chauvinists) come up with the old bureaucratic alternative of making dozens of administrative provinces on the basis of the current divisions run by commissioners.

They in fact take the province as a kind of municipal tier the way every governor-general and military-president tried to neutralise federating units by invoking local governments. In the absence of powerful local governments, undemocratically resisted by provincial nationalists, they are joined by other centrifugal elements within the federating units demanding their own provinces (Mohajir/Karachi and Hazara provinces).

The other view that contested this authoritarian model acknowledged the ethno-cultural-linguistic diversity of this newly independent country and stressed upon a unity-in-diversity approach to build an inclusive federation with an equal participation of autonomous federating units, as conceived by the 1940 Lahore Resolution.

There are Punjabi nationalists who, while abandoning their mother tongue in favour of Urdu/English, cling to an assimilation theory that declares Seraiki as a subordinate dialect of their own peculiar dialect (Majhi). According to the previous population census, Seraiki is the first-language of over 20 million people in southern Punjab, southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northern Sindh and eastern Baluchistan. From among the Indo-European and Indo-Aryan group, Seraiki is the language of the Lahnda region which shares some vocabulary and morphology with both Punjabi and Sindhi and, according to Grierson and Christopher Shackle, is radically different in phonology and grammar from Punjabi and is closer to Sindhi.

Regardless of semantics, Seraiki-speaking people are as culturally distinguished as other nationalities, and they love and own their culture and have suffered for too long at the hands of invaders, British colonialists and the Punjabi-Mohajir colonisers. Even when the mainstream parties agree to the Seraiki province, they fall back on the analogy of keeping Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as NWFP and avoid giving Seraiki Wasabi its national identity by instead proposing a ‘South Punjab’.

Whenever the campaign for a Seraiki province picks up, old stalwarts of the revival of the princely state of Bahawalpur (1802-1955) are activated to divide the movement. The princely sate of Bahawalpur was a part of the Punjab States Agency and was merged in the One-Unit. Restoration of the Bahawalpur state is problematic since there are other former princely states as well; it is a feudal demand and unviable. The real issue is of the capital of the new province. If the Seraiki nationalists agree to make Bahawalpur the capital of the new province, then the effort to divide Seraiki Wasabi could be defeated.

The historical tragedy with the Seraiki people is that they have been subjugated by a parasitic and exploitative feudal class of landlords and pirs. These pirs, landlords and tamandars always compromised on the rights of the Seraiki people and became a tool in the hands of colonialists and the dominant Punjab-Mohajir elite. And now they have again betrayed the cause of the Seraiki people, just to enjoy some perks in the new government.

Let the Seraiki people assert their democratic will and become the fifth federating unit to remove an inherent imbalance between a majority Punjab and minority provinces. But the issue of the Seraiki province has come on the agenda when provincial autonomy and the 18thAmendment are again under serious threat.

The writer is a senior journalist.

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