Pakistan’s provinces reveal South Asia’s unfinished struggle with diversity

Pakistan is set to introduce changes in its administrative structure by making new provinces. A few weeks before, Mohsin Naqvi, Pakistan's interior minister, remarked that Pakistan's governance and administrative system needed a major overhaul as the current system was not delivering. His comment led to widespread speculation amid political circles leading to opposition towards changing the structure of the federation.

The primary rationale being given for the creation of new provinces is better governance and service delivery for the citizens as the size and population of the current provinces is too large to serve the population efficiently as power is often centralized. While this may be true, the issue is much more nuanced and demands to be seen in light of historical facts.

Pakistan is a federation consisting of four provinces divided on ethnic lines and boundaries. After the country gained independence in 1947, when the British partitioned India into two, Pakistan got the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and the erstwhile NWFP bordering Afghanistan, now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, along with East Bengal.

It is important to understand that each of these provinces had its own distinct ethnic and linguistic identity, which predated the creation of Pakistan and even the British Raj. To assume that their identities would be subsumed into the greater identity of Pakistan was a mistake and remains a mistake with the Pakistani state to this date.

Ever since the birth of the country, the state has tried to forge a national identity around an ideology of Pakistan based on Islam and the idea of Muslims as a separate nation. The Two-Nation Theory was indeed instrumental in the creation of Pakistan. Yet a national identity built on Islam alone has proved insufficient to unite a people of such diverse ethnic and linguistic makeup. This is not to deny that ethnic communities can also hold a Pakistani identity. Rather, their own ethnic identities remain equally important and cannot simply be overshadowed or absorbed into a single national identity. They must be preserved.

This, however, is something the Pakistani polity failed to do. In the very beginning, in March 1948, during his visit to Dhaka, Jinnah declared that only Urdu would be the state language of Pakistan, despite the fact that Bengalis constituted the majority of the population. This triggered outrage and protests in Dhaka almost immediately, and laid the foundation of a resentment that never really went away. In 1955, the government dissolved the four provinces of West Pakistan into a single administrative unit, One Unit, erasing the federating structure entirely. This was done primarily to offset the numerical majority of the Bengali population against that of West Pakistan, and it led to widespread resentment on both sides, in East Bengal at being outvoted regardless, and in West Pakistan's own provinces at having their individual identities merged into one whole unit against their will.

Eventually, the country lost its eastern half, leading to the creation of Bangladesh. This made the center, especially the civil and military establishment, particularly nervous about any nationalistic sentiment among ethnic groups.

The primary example is Balochistan where any attempt to assert genuine political autonomy has been met with central intervention. The province has seen repeated uprisings and remains the site of Pakistan’s most active separatist campaign. Current groups, especially the BLA, have carried out hundreds of attacks in 2025–26 targeting security forces, infrastructure and Chinese-linked projects. Long-standing grievances over resource exploitation, underdevelopment, missing persons and limited political agency continue to sustain the conflict.

By failing to acknowledge and honor the diversity of its different ethnicities, and failing to accept their identity, Pakistan was never able to build a federation in its true spirit. This changed in 2010, when parliament passed the 18th constitutional amendment granting autonomy to the provinces. Although it has led to a better division of resources through the NFC Awards, the amendment has failed to deliver significant reforms or better governance, as power has simply become centralized within the provinces instead. They have never devolved it further to local governments, fearing they would lose power and resources to a third tier of government, and so they hold on to it themselves.

For Pakistan today, the question of new provinces should therefore be dealt with constitutionally. The government advocating for the new units on an administrative basis must not forget that the identity of the ethnic groups is important and has driven much of friction between the center and peripheries. If the provincial assemblies concerned agree to the creation of new provinces, they should be created. But any attempt to divide them without the consent of the provincial stakeholders, the people and their elected representatives, will be detrimental to the federation. As for the governance woes, creating new provinces will not solve them. Only genuine devolution of power and a credible local government system will.

For now, it appears the push for new administrative units is being driven more by the center and establishment concerns than by genuine consensus among the federating units, ethnic populations and their political representatives. And that in itself risks repeating the same problem the Pakistani federation has long wrestled with — a strong center forcing changes against the collective will of the people of that region. Unless that pattern is broken, Pakistan will struggle to become a federation in the true sense of the word.

-Asia Media Centre