REGIONALISM

The second tendency manifest early on in Pakistan’s history was the organisation of resources and power to comport with the centralis­ing imperatives of the government. Parochial interests undergirded the construction of a putatively national political sphere, insofar as Punjabis and Urdu-speaking migrants from Muslim minority states together occupied the larger share of positions in the central admin­istrative structure and in the army.

On the other hand, Bengalis, nearly 53 per cent of the total popula­tion were woefully under-represented in the central government. With Karachi declared capital of the new state and the army high command also mainly stationed in the Western wing, Bengali remoteness from power would increase with time. The first federal formula put in place to replace the structure provided under the 1935 Act was contrived specifically to denude Bengali majoritarianism at the centre. The containment of regional politics was such as to create other trouble­some populations, leading the Sindhi and the Baloch also to voice demands for a greater share of political and economic power within the union.

While provincial Assemblies were in existence as per the 1935 Gov­ernment of India Act at the moment of Pakistan’s founding, there were rumours from the outset that there would be mergers across these administrative boundaries. Such advice was first dispensed by a special advisor to Governor-General Jinnah in 1948. Sir Archibald Rowland had recommended the merger of the western wing of Pakistan, com­prising Sindh, Punjab, the NWFP and Balochistan in order to facilitate economic growth and development.

Jinnah, for his part, used his powers of inducement with political leaders from the provinces to vest greater fiscal control at the centre by allowing it to be the sole collector of income tax revenue. Combined with the inability of provinces to raise sovereign debt on the open market, and given that the centre was generating over 90 per cent of all taxation revenue in the country, a situation of provincial dependency was clearly being created.^[95] The National Finance Award was contrived in 1951 as the official mechanism to engineer a distribution between the provinces and the centre for governmental revenue and finances. As a formula, it provided that the centre retain between 50 and 60 per cent of overall revenue for its own uses, whereas the provinces were accorded a share of the remainder on the basis of their population.^[96]

The earliest expression of regional disaffection was in Bengal. An initial demand was voiced for ‘full regional autonomy’ by the Parliamen­tary Party of the East Pakistani branch of the Muslim League itself.^[97] The demand was directed to retaining power at the provincial level for all functions of government other than defence and foreign affairs. Early on, patterns of under-funding from the centralised revenue pool indicated to elite Bengalis how material inequality could compromise their status in the nation itself.^[98]

Additionally, cultural chauvinism was expressed by the West when the Basic Principles Committee specified that Urdu would be the official language of government in Pakistan. This set off a slow-building agita­tion and was central to the creation of a coalition that won a resound­ing victory in the first East Bengal elections held in 1954.

The primacy of Urdu for the power establishment at the centre was owed both to its close association with Mughal rule as well as to the centrality of the Urdu-speaking elite in the Partition movement, as recounted in Chapter 1.^[100] Punjabis have always also been supportive of Urdu as the unifying language at the national level, even as the coali­tion of interest between them and the migrants would come under considerable strain in subsequent decades.

Migrant Muslims from the United and Central Provinces of India were rendered Muhajir or refugee in the first census, and this ‘official category of enumeration’ continues to define them.^[101] The greater number of Muhajirs settled in Sindh, primarily in urban centres and this established a fault-line between Muhajirs and Sindhis.^[102] From an initial period of being a dominant minority in the new state, Muhajir power would recede in the coming decades as Punjabi dominance grew more marked, and events such as the relocation of the federal capital to Islamabad created barriers to their access to power.

In these early years, the central government set a pattern for the future by retaining the colonial policy of indirect rule for popula­tions considered ungovernable. Thus, the Frontier Crimes Regulations of 1901 (FCR) was carried over for the administration of five tribal agencies within the NWFP. These areas were re-named the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). In 1952 a Balochistan States Union (BSU), not dissimilar to the treaty enforced by the British in the 1830s, was signed between the Khans of four Baloch territories, including Kalat. Each of these leaders ‘was to receive an annual allowance and to be part of a council of rulers’. One interesting development in this period was that a minister in the cabinet of the BSU ‘codified and compiled Baloch traditional law Riwaaj’ and promulgated it as regular law, under the cover of the FCR, which was also administered here in parts of the province.^[103]

Coinciding with the declaration of the BSU, huge reserves of natural gas were discovered in Balochistan in 1952 and commercial exploita­tion was begun.

Through these early years an establishment clique at the centre persisted in elaborating plans that would work to subsume regional demands in the West and prevent a majoritarian take-over by Bengalis at the centre. They endeavoured to do this through a refashioning of political units and by tinkering with the principles of proportional rep­resentation. Notably, this clique was not yet willing to ride roughshod over the aspirations for self-rule or representative government that had fueled the independence and Partition movements, in this drive to expand its own powers. Various plans to provide for parity, an equality of representation between the two wings in the central legislature, with or without the addition of other counter-majoritarian measures, were tabled.^[105]

Finally, in November 1954, the One Unit scheme, a proposal to merge Sindh, Punjab, NWFP and Balochistan into a single province, was announced in the Assembly. Although ultimately an executive Act would make the plan a reality, the first Constituent Assembly debated the contours of the proposal prior to its dissolution.^[106] As noted by Sadia Toor, the idea of forging a singular identity amongst the West Pakistani population borrowed heavily from the ideas that had earlier been used to unify Muslims across the subcontinent.^[107] The irony in positing that geographical contiguity had bred similarities in primar­ily cultural terms was that such an argument was a rejoinder to the characterisation of Muslims, who shared a moral order deriving from common faith, as themselves a distinct nation. Politicians from East Pakistan, Bengal, were quick to point this out and a similar resistance was voiced by political spokespersons of all but the Muhajir and the Punjabi in what became for some time (1955—70) the province of West Pakistan.

As will be seen in Chapter 6, the formal parameters of federalism have effaced some of these tensions through the mechanics of formal recognition. Nonetheless, both intra-group and centre-province rela­tions in the federation continue to profoundly recreate situations of unrest and regional disequilibrium.

III.