As a federal republic since its inception, Pakistan has experienced endemic problems that have plagued its centre-province relations, including perceived inequitable allocation of financial resources and the extent of political autonomy. Current crises include a rise in separatist and violent secessionist movements, a demand for new provinces, and a marked rise in peripheral politics. This study explores structural patterns and political processes that facilitated the rise of indigenous identities in Pakistan. In particular, it seeks to explain the changing landscape of ethnic politics within the context of Pakistan’s political history.
Nationalism denotes a shared identity revolving around a sense of jingoism associated primarily with a nation. It involves a sense of belonging to a communal identity and sharing a common culture, ethnicity, or religion. The pattern of identity construction varies from state to state. Pakistan offers a unique case study of identity construction, using Islam as an instrumental variable.
The origins of a common Muslim nationalist identity in Pakistan are complex. Throughout its several thousand-year history, the Indian subcontinent never experienced centralised rule, and no single ruler consolidated power over the region’s entire territory. The political structure of the subcontinent has long been decentralised, consisting of small kingdoms managed by indigenous rulers. Imperial powers delegated governing authority to local leaders, who in return pledged their loyalty to the empire. Consequently, a singular identity never emerged in the subcontinent. The territory now comprising Pakistan never experienced centralised rule; rather, local rulers relied on existing tribal and feudal structures to govern by proxy.
As British colonial rule neared its end, Muslim nationalism emerged as justification for an independent homeland, with advocates of a Pakistani state using Islam as the basis of a shared political identity. With this possible exception of Islam, a genuine sense of a singular Pakistani national identity has never existed. The role of Islam as a motivator of national identity came to the fore during the World War II era with the beginnings of regional decolonisation, and in turn, political vacuums over which Hindus and Muslims competed. As a result, Islam served as a political justification for the two-nation theory, creating a separate country post-decolonisation, which won the support of a diverse collection of ethnicities.
Before the partition of the Indian subcontinent, peripheral, often ethnic-based identities dominated any sense of shared identity on the subcontinent. Punjab’s pre-World War II opposition to the creation of a single nation-state indicates the strength of ethnic identities in Pakistan. In fact, it was not until 1946 that Punjab’s leading political voices threw their support behind the aforementioned two-nation plan. The Punjab Unionist Party, a regional ethnic party representing Punjabis and led by Sikandar Hayat Khan, presented a formidable counterbalance to the All-India Muslim League. When Khan integrated the Punjab Unionist Party into the Muslim League, the case for Pakistan in Punjab strengthened substantially.
Rising ethnic nationalism has further hindered government efforts to consolidate a singular religious-based national identity that could transcend local loyalties. Pakistan’s social demography is divided along linguistic and ethnic orientations, and Islam has not proven sufficient to unite a group of people divided by diverse languages, castes, cultures, tribes, and historical experiences. The separation of East Pakistan — creating the state of Bangladesh — serves as a poignant example of the collapse of the two-nation theory when a large part of the population prioritised ethnic identity over religious identity. This considerably undermined citizens’ belief in the viability of a single Pakistani nation united by Islam. Since then, scepticism of Pakistan’s national Islamic identity has only grown. This trend generates important questions about why public resonance of a national Pakistani identity has steadily diminished since the country’s independence.
Three key factors have contributed to the erosion of a common Pakistani identity: (1) inequitable allocation of financial resources (2) army’s dominance over political processes and its tendency to adopt discriminatory policies; and (3) political marginalisation of the smaller federating units. In particular, the relationship between Punjab and Pakistan’s other provinces evidences these key factors. Punjab is Pakistan’s most populous province and holds disproportionate control over the national economy, distribution of jobs, and institutional development. As a result, the other provinces exhibit underdevelopment — both structural and institutional — relative to Punjab. Based on these discrepancies, constituents of many Pakistani provinces perceive Punjab as exploiting their national financial resources. Punjab heavily influences the federal government, and other provinces presume the centre — identified in this piece as the Pakistani federal government — to be subservient to Punjab.
In Pakistan, allocation of federal financial resources to the provinces takes place through awards determined by the National Finance Commission (NFC). The NFC constitutes a series of economic programmes first established in 1951, although the Pakistani government only presented the first formal NFC award in its current form after the country adopted its 1973 constitution. The NFC grants awards on a five-year basis using an allocation formula revised every five years. The federal government uses this allocation formula to engineer policies for the collection and redistribution of taxes. Smaller provinces have always viewed the NFC award with suspicion because they perceive the allocation methodology to be discriminatory. This perception owes to the fact that until 2010 the sole criterion for national resource allocation was a province’s population size, which inherently put Punjab in an advantageous position, as Punjab is one of four provinces but is home to more than 56 percent of the country’s population.
In utilising this population-based allocation system, Pakistan’s federal government arguably failed to meet its constitutionally mandated commitment to treat all provinces equally. As a result of this failure and the perception by the other provinces of their disadvantage, they demanded a revision of the NFC formula. Of particular note, Sindh province sought greater recognition for its substantial economic contributions, as it claimed to contribute 70 percent of the total divisible pool of financial resources, owing to the fact that the country’s only major port, Karachi, is located in Sindh. Additionally, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) demanded recognition for the hydroelectricity it provided to the broader country, and argued that KPK’s relative poverty to the Pakistani average merited a larger NFC award. Similarly, Balochistan sought NFC adoption of a formula emphasising natural resources and geographic size as criterion for financial resource allocation — both of which would benefit the Balochistan province’s award amount.
(To be concluded)
This article originally appeared in the SAIS Review of International Affairs, Journal of John Hopkins University, Summer-Fall 2015, and is published in the form of opinion article for the general interest of the readers
The writer is a lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He is the author of Democracy in Pakistan: From Rhetoric to Reality (Islamabad: Narratives, 2015)