Freedom of Expression or Freedom to Spread Disorde…

For eighteen years, I have made a quiet, sometimes lonely case: that technology, not more paperwork and more offices, is the only honest path to good governance in Pakistan. I did not arrive at this conviction from a textbook. I arrived at it from a desk inside the Planning Commission, watching a system that was designed — on paper — to deliver development, and instead delivered delay, opacity, and grievance. Anyone who has sat through the sanctioning of a Public Sector Development Program (PSDP) project knows the ritual. The feasibility study is glowing. The PC-1 is approved with confident projections. Committees nod. Funds are released. And then the project disappears into the machinery of provincial implementation, where oversight thins out and accountability evaporates. What was promised on paper and what is delivered on the ground are, more often than not, two entirely different stories. I watched this happen again and again, and each time the gap between sanction and delivery was not explained by a shortage of money or expertise. It was explained by bureaucracy — a system built not to serve citizens but to preserve itself. This is not an abstract observation. It is the root of a very real and very dangerous problem. A significant part of the unrest we see in Balochistan, in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not simply about resources or geography. It is about the absence of transparency and the absence of governance that people can see, question, and trust. When a citizen cannot find out where a development fund went, when a project sanctioned in Islamabad never materializes as promised in a district headquarters, when the only visible authority is a bureaucrat with a stamp and a discretionary signature, resentment grows. People do not rebel against distance from the capital. They rebel against being governed by a system that treats them as subjects to be managed rather than citizens to be served. And here is the tragedy that too few are willing to name plainly: the bureaucratic architecture we still operate under was never designed to serve the governed. It was designed by the British Raj to control a colonized population — to extract revenue, maintain order, and ensure that authority always flowed downward from a distant center, never upward from the people. Files, layers of clearance, and the personal discretion of an officer were features of a colonial control system, not instruments of democratic accountability. We inherited that machinery at independence and, astonishingly, kept it largely intact. The tool built to pacify a colony has been repurposed, with barely a redesign, to govern a republic. It should trouble us deeply that a structure engineered to keep a colonized people in check is now one of the principal reasons that Pakistan’s most marginalized regions distrust their own government. So when the conversation turns, as it periodically does, to creating new administrative units — carving out new divisions, new districts, new tiers of provincial machinery — as the answer to Balochistan’s or KPK’s grievances, I feel obligated to push back, loudly. Before we draw a single new administrative boundary, we must confront the core disease, not multiply its symptoms. New units will not dilute bureaucratic power; they will replicate it. Every new administrative tier is another office, another set of discretionary signatures, another opportunity for the same colonial-era logic of gatekeeping to entrench itself further. For the aggrieved citizen in Turbat or Muzaffarabad or Bannu, a new secretariat is not relief. It is simply a new address for the same unaccountable authority. We would be handing the bureaucracy — an institution that has shown a consistent instinct for self-preservation — more territory to govern, not less power to abuse. Real relief requires shrinking the space in which discretion operates unchecked, not expanding the number of desks where it can be exercised. This is precisely why the moment for AI-enabled local governance has arrived, and why Pakistan can no longer afford to treat it as a distant aspiration. Around the world, and notably across India, urban local bodies and municipalities are moving beyond basic digitization toward what might be called algorithms of accountability — systems purpose-built to increase transparency, limit human discretion where it invites abuse, and protect citizen data. These frameworks generally rest on a few consistent pillars: ensuring that automated public decisions on things like welfare disbursement or tax assessment can be audited and challenged rather than buried in a file; protecting citizen data through clear legal safeguards; requiring any private vendor supplying government technology to disclose how its systems work; and actively checking automated tools for bias against marginalized communities. The Indian experience offers concrete, transferable lessons. Municipal bodies in cities like Delhi and Bengaluru now use satellite imagery and mapping systems to flag unauthorized construction and property tax discrepancies — but critically, they pair this with a human-verification step, so an algorithm’s flag is only ever an advisory alert, not a final punishment, creating a documented trail a citizen can actually contest. States such as Telangana and Maharashtra have deployed multilingual citizen chatbots to handle civic complaints, built with data-masking safeguards that strip personal information before it ever touches a broader system. Smart-city command centers in Surat and Pune operate under strict data retention rules, so surveillance footage is automatically deleted unless tied to an active investigation, preventing the machinery from becoming a permanent surveillance state. And where facial-recognition attendance systems have been used to track municipal staff, unions pushed successfully for dispute mechanisms so that a technical glitch never costs a worker their wages. None of these systems eliminate human judgment. What they eliminate is unaccountable, invisible, discretionary human judgment — the exact currency the colonial bureaucracy was built to trade in. That is the reform Pakistan needs at the local government level: not another administrative layer, but a transparent, auditable, citizen-facing system that makes it structurally difficult for a project to vanish between sanction and delivery, and structurally easy for a citizen in the

A man’s hand emerges from a moving car window on Lahore’s Ferozepur Road, opens, and lets go, garbage tumbling onto the road like something the city never asked for. He drives on, does not look back. Nearby, another man treats a red light as inconvenience, not command, and guns through it because the road, for one careless breath, looks empty, not realizing a motorcyclist is already crossing into that emptiness. Neither would call himself careless. Ask them, and they will say, with the confidence of the unexamined life, that they are decent, law-abiding citizens, and narrowly, they are not wrong. Neither has broken a law that will ever find them. What they are missing is something smaller than law and, in the end, far heavier: civic sense. Civic sense is a phrase worn smooth by overuse and rarely defined. It is not patriotism, that loud, flag-waving thing. It is not obedience, that bowed, fearful thing. It is, instead, a kind of seeing, the awareness that one’s actions ripple into rooms one will never enter: the neighbour’s wall, turned dumping ground; the footpath, swallowed by parked motorcycles, leaving the pedestrian nowhere to stand but the road; the river downstream, carrying someone else’s filth to a family that never asked for it. It is the quiet discipline of behaving as though other people exist and matter, even when no policeman stands at the corner. Pakistan is not short of laws. Karachi’s bylaws on waste disposal would look entirely respectable in any city hall in the world. Islamabad’s traffic regulations are detailed enough to please the most exacting planner. What is missing is not ink on paper but something beneath the skin: the private sense that a rule is worth keeping even when no one is watching. This is why civic sense cannot be legislated into being, however many statutes are stacked atop one another. You can fine a man for littering. You cannot fine him into loving the street he lives on. Take something as unremarkable as a queue. Anyone who has stood at a bank counter, a railway window, a hospital OPD here knows the choreography by heart: the line exists as an idea until someone decides their time outweighs everyone else’s, and it dissolves like sugar in water. This was never really about queues. It is about a deeper assumption: that public space belongs to no one in particular, and rules, somehow, are meant for other people. Multiply that across a city of ten million restless souls, and you get gridlock that swallows whole afternoons, bins overflowing like wounds left untended, and parks abandoned within a year of their own birth. There is a cost to all this, rarely counted honestly. Karachi bleeds away enormous productive hours each year to congestion worsened, not created, by drivers who treat lanes as suggestions and red lights as optional punctuation. Public health suffers when open drains and uncollected waste become nurseries for disease, an arithmetic residents of nearly every major Pakistani city have learned to expect each monsoon. None of this appears, tidy and legible, in a budget document. It appears in hospital wards, in wages lost to sick days, in a low-grade sense that public life is something to survive rather than inhabit. It would be convenient to lay the blame entirely at poverty or lack of schooling, and there is a grain of truth there; a person fighting daily to feed a family has little room left for civic virtue. But the explanation only carries so far. Plenty of well-off, well-schooled Pakistanis fling litter from car windows and treat public parks as private gardens annexed from the commons. Civic sense is not a simple function of income. It is a habit, built through repetition, example, and whatever a society quietly agrees to call normal. This is precisely where schools could do far more. Civic education in most Pakistani classrooms, where it exists at all, survives as a chapter memorized for an exam rather than a practice lived out. A child taught that littering is wrong, who watches the adults around her litter daily without flinching, will absorb the adults’ hands, not the textbook’s words. Civic sense must be modelled, not narrated: teachers who insist on a clean classroom, parents who do not fling wrappers from car windows in front of watching children, local governments that follow a complaint through to its end instead of letting it dissolve into some forgotten file. None of this demands grand reform. It demands a shift in what ordinary people find embarrassing. In cities where civic sense runs deep, a litterer feels a small, hot flush of shame, not because a fine is coming, but because it simply is not done, the way one does not spit at a wedding. That social pressure is more powerful, and far cheaper, than any enforcement machinery a government could design. Building it takes time, and begins small: a shopkeeper sweeping the pavement outside his door, a driver waiting his turn at a roundabout though no one would know if he cheated, a resident reporting a broken streetlight instead of learning to walk around the dark. Cities are not, in truth, built by planners and engineers alone. They are built street by street, choice by choice, by the accumulated decisions of the people who walk them. A country may possess the widest roads and tallest towers in the region and still feel chaotic if the people moving through them share no responsibility toward them. Civic sense is not a lesson for children, nor a slogan for a billboard. It is the invisible infrastructure, unseen and indispensable, that makes every other infrastructure actually work. The writer is serving as Director of the Institute of Humanities and Arts at Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan.

The fourth part of this series argued that reforms fail when their design ignores the constitutional rules, institutional incentives and political interests that determine implementation. Pakistan’s problem, however, goes deeper than the capture of individual tax measures. The state itself has gradually become accustomed to obtaining resources through rents rather than creating the conditions for sustained production. A rent is an economic benefit obtained through control over a privilege, resource, regulation or strategic position rather than through corresponding productive activity. Rent-seeking begins when individuals, institutions and organised groups devote their energies to obtaining such benefits from the state instead of producing goods, improving services, developing technology or competing in open markets. Pakistan’s political economy has long rewarded access more generously than enterprise. Access to state land, subsidised credit, protected markets, statutory exemptions, import licences, public contracts, regulatory concessions, tax amnesties, administered prices and preferential treatment has frequently generated returns exceeding those available from productive investment. The result is an economy in which political connections can matter more than innovation, and proximity to authority can be more valuable than efficiency. This system is sustained at two interconnected levels. Domestically, privileged groups compete for benefits distributed through state power. Externally, the state repeatedly seeks resources by converting Pakistan’s strategic location and security relevance into financial assistance, debt rollovers, deposits, concessional oil arrangements and diplomatic support. The interaction between these two levels is central to understanding Pakistan’s continued dependence. External financing is not inherently harmful. Developing countries require foreign capital, technology and access to markets. Borrowing can finance infrastructure and productive capacity that generate future income sufficient to service the debt. Strategic partnerships can provide security and economic opportunities. The problem arises when external inflows substitute for domestic transformation. Pakistan has repeatedly treated foreign exchange availability as proof of economic recovery. Reserves rise after an IMF disbursement, bilateral deposit, commercial loan or rollover. The immediate threat of default recedes. The exchange rate stabilises and the government declares that confidence has returned. The underlying productive structure, however, may remain unchanged. The IMF completed the third review of Pakistan’s Extended Fund Facility in May 2026, permitting immediate disbursements of approximately US$1.1 billion under the EFF and US$220 million under the Resilience and Sustainability Facility.  Total disbursements under the two arrangements consequently reached about US$4.8 billion. The Fund also reported progress in rebuilding reserves and achieving the agreed primary surplus. These developments provide necessary breathing space. They do not constitute economic independence. Recent events offer an unusually clear illustration. Pakistan reportedly requested a US$10 billion exchange-stabilisation facility from the United States after playing a diplomatic role in the Middle Eastern conflict. Economists quoted by Reuters questioned whether fresh financing would address the reforms Islamabad had repeatedly avoided. One analyst described the proposed support as “geopolitical rent”. Pakistan had earlier repaid US$3.5 billion to the United Arab Emirates and obtained a US$3 billion Saudi backstop to help fill the resulting gap.  The episode is not remarkable because Pakistan sought assistance during a difficult external shock. Responsible governments must protect reserves and manage emergencies. Its significance lies in the familiar institutional response: once again, strategic usefulness is expected to generate the liquidity required to postpone a deeper restructuring of the economy. However, fresh liquidity can purchase time. It cannot manufacture productivity. Pakistan’s external relationships have repeatedly followed this pattern. During the Cold War, the country received assistance because of its strategic position. The Afghan war transformed Pakistan into a frontline state and brought large flows of military and economic support. The post-2001 “war on terror” renewed the same bargain under different circumstances. Regional conflicts, security alliances and diplomatic mediation continue to create opportunities for financial support. Each inflow temporarily relaxes the pressure for reform. It also strengthens those institutions capable of negotiating and managing the strategic bargain. The constitutional consequence is profound. A state financed substantially through its citizens must negotiate with them. It requires a productive economy capable of generating taxable income and a political order capable of securing broad consent. A state able to obtain resources externally can delay that negotiation. This is one reason why taxation and representation cannot be separated. Dependence upon external rents weakens the fiscal relationship between citizen and state. Governments remain less accountable to taxpayers when foreign creditors, strategic partners and captive domestic sectors provide the resources necessary for survival.  The burden of adjustment is then transferred to those lacking political protection. Salaried persons face deduction before receiving their income. Documented businesses encounter withholding taxes, minimum taxes, advance taxes and delayed refunds.  Consumers pay indirect taxes and levies through electricity, fuel, telecommunications and ordinary purchases.  Powerful sectors negotiate exemptions, reduced rates, amnesties or deferred enforcement. External rents and domestic privileges are therefore not separate distortions. They reinforce each other. The article, “The age of implosion: exhaustion and the hollow core”, recently published in Business Recorder, offers a useful metaphor for this condition. It argues that financial movement can create the appearance of vitality while the productive foundations of the economy continue to weaken. Loans, deposits and other inflows may keep institutions operating outwardly even when their inner capacity is being exhausted.  The metaphor requires institutional precision. Pakistan has not ceased functioning. Taxes are collected, budgets are passed, debt is serviced, imports continue and administrative structures remain active. The state survives through a combination of borrowing, external support, remittances, taxation of captive sectors and periodic transfer of costs to future generations. This should not be mistaken for resilience. It is deferred adjustment.  The official Pakistan Economic Survey 2025–26 continues to organise the country’s performance through conventional categories of growth, investment, trade, fiscal development, public debt and social indicators. These measurements are necessary, but they do not fully capture the political mechanisms determining why available resources flow towards consumption, protection and rent extraction rather than productivity, human development and technological advancement.  A rent-based economy also shapes the behaviour of the private sector. Businesses rationally adapt to the incentives created by the state. Where profits depend upon tariff protection, regulatory discretion, government contracts,

There is a moment in every negotiation when the mask slips and the real hierarchy of loyalties reveals itself. It happened again recently, in the quiet grammar of a policy condition. If a deal with Iran is good for America, if it stops a war, secures a region, spares American blood and treasure, then it should be pursued on its own terms. It should not need to be laundered through a second question, but what does Israel get out of it? The moment that second question enters the room, the first one has already been answered, and not in America’s favour. This is not a rhetorical trick. It is a structural tell. A foreign policy genuinely organised around American interests does not require the ratification of an ally before it proceeds. It calculates costs, weighs risks, and acts. The insertion of an Israeli veto, soft, implicit, but unmistakable, into decisions that are framed as being about American security is not an alliance functioning normally. It is a client relationship wearing the costume of a partnership, and increasingly, the costume does not fit. I do not say this as someone hostile to alliances. Alliances are the ordinary furniture of statecraft, and no serious analyst begrudges Washington its relationships. What I begrudge, what any honest observer of the last two decades of American foreign policy must eventually begrudge, is the peculiar one-directionality of this particular relationship, in which American strategic autonomy is perpetually available for negotiation, but Israeli strategic autonomy is not. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have discovered that the fastest way to kill a sound policy is to let it wander anywhere near Jerusalem’s objections. The Biden administration played this game with a kind of practiced fluency, dressing subservience in the language of “shared values” and “unbreakable bonds.” That the current administration appears to be playing the identical game, merely with a different set of talking points, should trouble anyone who once believed that a change in party might also mean a change in posture. The deeper dishonesty, though, sits beneath the day-to-day theatre of negotiation. It is the elephant that everyone in the room has agreed, by unspoken consensus, not to see. Iran is treated as the singular proliferation emergency of the Middle East, the country whose enrichment levels must be monitored down to the percentage point, whose every centrifuge is a matter of international alarm, whose nuclear ambitions justify sanctions regimes, covert sabotage, and the standing threat of military strikes. And yet a few hundred kilometers away sits a state that has possessed nuclear weapons for more than half a century, has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has never submitted to an inspection regime of any kind, and whose arsenal is discussed in Western capitals only in the passive voice, if it is discussed at all. Israel’s bomb is an open secret that everyone has agreed to keep. This is not a minor inconsistency. It is the load-bearing hypocrisy of the entire non-proliferation architecture in West Asia. You cannot credibly claim to be pursuing a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free Middle East while exempting, by unspoken convention, the one state in the region that actually has the weapons in question. Every argument marshalled against Iran’s nuclear programme, that a nuclear-armed state destabilizes its neighbors, that it invites arms races, that it holds regional security hostage to the judgment of a single government, applies with at least equal force to Israel, and applies to a country that has, unlike Iran, already used overwhelming force against multiple neighbors within living memory. The asymmetry is not a technical oversight. It is a choice, made and remade by every administration that has declined to place Israel’s arsenal on the table. What this reveals, I think, is that the “Iran obsession,” as it might fairly be called, was never really about proliferation at all. If it were, the conversation would begin with disarmament architecture applied evenhandedly across the region, inspections offered and demanded in both directions, and a serious reckoning with the double standard that has calcified into policy over fifty years. Instead, the Iran file functions as a proxy for a different question entirely, whose security calculus gets to define American Middle East policy. And on that question, the answer has been remarkably consistent regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. None of this is a case for indulging Tehran’s own record, which carries its own list of grievances worth prosecuting honestly, its human rights abuses, its regional proxies, its own history of destabilizing behavior. Clear-eyed criticism of Iran is entirely compatible with clear-eyed criticism of the double standard applied to Israel; the two are not in tension, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of evasion. But a foreign policy that claims the mantle of principle while practicing this degree of selective vision is not principled. It is theatre, and increasingly unconvincing theatre, performed for a domestic audience that is growing visibly tired of the script. The unpopularity of this arrangement is no longer a fringe sentiment. It shows up in polling, in generational splits within America’s own political coalitions, in the rising discomfort even among constituencies that have historically been the most reliable defenders of the relationship. People are noticing the pattern: that policies justified as serving American interests keep bending, at the last moment, toward a different set of interests altogether. They are asking, reasonably, who is actually driving the car. There is also a historical dimension to this that deserves more attention than it usually receives. The pattern of conditioning American policy on Israeli comfort did not begin with Iran, and it will not end there. It runs through decades of vetoed resolutions at the United Nations, through arms transfers that continued uninterrupted even amid documented humanitarian catastrophe, through the quiet understanding that certain questions simply are not to be raised in polite Washington company. Each individual instance can be explained away with its own set of justifications, security concerns, historical debts, domestic political realities. But taken together, across administrations

The United Nations General Assembly settled 12 August as International Youth Day in 1999, following a recommendation of the World Conference of Ministers Responsible for Youth. The first International Youth Day was observed in 2000. Since then, every year on 12 August, the world observes International Youth Day. This day recognizes the contribution of young people and brings the challenges they face into public and policy discussions. Young people must have meaningful opportunities to participate in decisions that affect their education, employment, communities and future. The United Nations defines youth, for statistical purposes, as persons between 15 and 24 years of age. There are around 1.2 billion young people in this age group worldwide, representing approximately 16 percent of the global population. By 2030, their number is projected to reach nearly 1.3 billion. These figures tell an important story. The success of our development policies will depend significantly on whether this generation has access to quality education, decent employment, skills, justice, equality and meaningful participation. Young people are entering adulthood at a time of extraordinary change. Artificial intelligence and digital technologies are transforming education and employment. Climate change is reshaping economies and communities. Conflicts and displacement continue to affect millions. At the same time, young people themselves are developing new ideas, businesses, technologies and social movements to respond to these challenges. The question is not what governments can do for youth, but what governments and institutions can achieve with youth. The international approach towards youth has gradually evolved. Participation, development and peace have been central themes of the UN’s work on youth for decades. In 2015, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace and Security, recognizing the important role young people can play in preventing violence and building peace. This recognition is significant because youth participation should go beyond inviting young people to conferences, consultations or ceremonial events. Meaningful participation means providing them with a genuine opportunity to influence policies and institutions. One of the strongest messages emerging from recent International Youth Day discussions is the importance of local youth action. The UN’s 2025 theme, “Local Youth Actions for the SDGs and Beyond,” emphasized that global development commitments ultimately have to produce results in communities. The UN noted that more than 65 percent of Sustainable Development Goal targets are linked to local governance, making youth participation at the local level particularly important. The Sustainable Development Goals may be global, but many of the problems they address are experienced locally. A young person experiences unemployment in a household, not in an international conference. A girl experiences barriers to education in her community. Climate change may appear in the form of floods, drought, extreme heat or disappearing livelihoods. Discrimination, violence and exclusion are similarly experienced in everyday life. This is why youth participation must reach local government, educational institutions, community organizations and development programmes. Young people should have opportunities not only to identify problems but also to help design and implement solutions. The theme of International Youth Day 2026 is “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations,”. The theme explains that though young people live in very different social, economic, and geographic circumstances, they share common hopes for dignity, quality education, decent work, meaningful participation, equal opportunity, and a sustainable future. These aspirations are particularly important for youth in Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries, and Small Island Developing States, where poverty, climate change, geographic isolation, digital inequality, and limited opportunities often create additional barriers. Yet young people are not simply recipients of development; they are leaders, innovators, and co-creators of change. Equipping them with future-ready skills can enable them to turn shared challenges into shared solutions. Education systems therefore cannot remain focused only on degrees and examinations. Young people need critical thinking, communication, creativity, digital literacy, problem-solving and the ability to continuously learn. At the same time, access must remain central. Opportunities created by technology mean little if large numbers of young people lack quality education, internet access, training or pathways into decent employment. Young people’s role is equally important in strengthening justice and peaceful societies. When young people feel excluded from institutions and decision-making, the distance between citizens and the State can increase. Conversely, meaningful civic participation can strengthen trust, social cohesion and accountability. Young people should therefore have space in discussions about the rule of law, access to justice, gender equality, climate justice, human rights and peacebuilding. Their participation should extend from community initiatives to national policymaking. The scale of Pakistan’s youth population makes these challenges even more significant. The 2023 census recorded 67 percent of Pakistan’s population as below the age of 30, while around 63 million people, or 26 percent of the population, were between 15 and 29. Yet demographic strength contrasts sharply with socioeconomic reality: around 27 percent of young people are illiterate, while World Bank estimates indicate that 37 percent of those aged 15-24 are not in employment, education or training. At the same time, this is an increasingly connected generation that uses digital technology and social media to express its opinions, aspirations and frustrations. Young Pakistanis want to be heard and to have a meaningful role in policymaking, but many perceive traditional political structures as disconnected from their concerns. Their disengagement from conventional politics should therefore not necessarily be interpreted as political apathy; it may instead reflect disillusionment with institutions that they believe do not adequately represent them. A particularly serious challenge is the growing sense of frustration among Pakistan’s young people. When young people see limited space for participation in political decision-making, few opportunities for economic advancement, and an education system that does not sufficiently encourage critical and independent thinking, frustration can gradually turn into hopelessness. 829,000 Pakistanis registered for employment abroad in 2022 as an indication of the desire to seek opportunities elsewhere. The larger lesson is that Pakistan cannot treat its youth merely as a population statistic; young people need meaningful inclusion in political, economic and intellectual life. International Youth Day should encourage governments, universities, civil society, development organizations

The debate over Pakistan’s administrative structure has returned to the national stage after Interior Minister Syed Mohsin Raza Naqvi suggested that the country should seriously examine the question of creating new provinces or administrative units. Predictably, the discussion immediately descended into familiar political slogans. Some portrayed the proposal as a threat to federalism, others embraced it as the long-awaited solution to governance failures. Between these two extremes lies a far more important question: what does the Constitution of Pakistan actually permit, and what course best serves national unity at a time of unprecedented regional instability? The timing of the debate is significant. Pakistan today faces persistent security challenges in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, constitutional sensitivities relating to Azad Jammu and Kashmir, continuing political polarisation, and a rapidly deteriorating strategic environment as conflict in the Middle East threatens to reshape regional geopolitics. In such circumstances, constitutional reform should not be driven by political expediency. It must be guided by constitutional principles, empirical evidence and the long-term interests of the federation. The Constitution of islamic Republic of Pakistan is neither silent nor rigid on the question of creating new provinces. Article 1 recognises Pakistan as a federation consisting of provinces and territories whose limits may be altered in accordance with the Constitution. However, Article 239(4) places an important constitutional safeguard on any proposal affecting provincial boundaries. No constitutional amendment that alters the limits of a province can become law unless, in addition to obtaining the prescribed parliamentary majority, it is approved by not less than two-thirds of the members of the provincial assembly concerned. This requirement reflects the federal compact. Provinces are not merely administrative divisions; they are constitutional partners in the federation. Consequently, no province can be divided, merged or otherwise altered through a simple parliamentary majority in Islamabad. Provincial consent is itself a constitutional requirement. This constitutional position explains why proposals for South Punjab, Bahawalpur, Hazara or other new provinces have repeatedly surfaced over the past two decades but have never matured into constitutional reality. Various drafts, often described collectively as proposals for a Twenty-Eighth Constitutional Amendment, have circulated in political and academic circles. They have contemplated the creation of additional provinces together with corresponding adjustments in Senate representation, National Finance Commission allocations, provincial institutions and administrative structures. Yet none has commanded the political consensus demanded by Article 239. Constitutional design has proved stronger than political rhetoric. The debate, however, should not begin with Article 239. It should begin with Article 140A. Inserted through the Constitution (Eighteenth Amendment) Act of 2010, Article 140A obliges every province to establish a local government system and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to elected representatives. This is not merely a recommendation. It is a constitutional command. Unfortunately, after even lapse of 16 years, this remains a constitutional provision that has been implemented (sic) with greater reluctance. Successive provincial governments, irrespective of political affiliation, have preferred centralised provincial bureaucracies over constitutionally empowered local governments. Elections have been delayed, powers diluted, finances retained by provincial capitals and administrative authority reclaimed through executive control. The result is that Pakistan continues to speak the language of devolution while practising administrative centralisation. Before demanding new provinces, one must ask a more fundamental question: has Pakistan sincerely implemented the Constitution it already possesses? The empirical evidence nevertheless deserves serious attention. Pakistan has experienced extraordinary demographic transformation since independence. The country’s population has increased from approximately 34 million in the early years of independence to over 255 million today, yet the number of provinces has remained unchanged. The presentation recently unveiled on constitutional and administrative reforms demonstrates this remarkable contrast and argues that governance structures have failed to evolve alongside population growth. It further notes that each of Pakistan’s four provinces administers populations exceeding those of many sovereign countries and that, among major federations, Pakistan places an unusually large administrative burden upon each provincial government. Whether one accepts every conclusion of that presentation/study or not, the underlying constitutional question cannot be ignored. Effective governance depends not merely upon constitutional powers but upon administrative reach. A provincial capital hundreds of kilometres from remote districts inevitably encounters greater challenges in delivering education, healthcare, policing and justice than a more decentralised system. The presentation also links many development indicators with administrative distance from provincial capitals, suggesting that constitutional debate should be informed by measurable governance outcomes rather than political sentiment alone. However,  administrative efficiency is only one dimension of federalism. The second is national integration. Pakistan’s history demonstrates that provincial identities become dangerous only when constitutional grievances remain unresolved. Conversely, attempts to suppress legitimate constitutional debate merely strengthen centrifugal tendencies. The Constitution therefore wisely provides a peaceful and democratic mechanism through which territorial adjustments may be considered while ensuring that no province loses its constitutional status without its own consent. This balanced approach deserves preservation. Current security realities also counsel prudence. Parts of Balochistan continue to face organised violence supported by hostile external actors. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa confronts renewed terrorist activity along its western frontier. Azad Jammu and Kashmir occupies a unique constitutional and strategic position within Pakistan’s national policy on Jammu and Kashmir. Simultaneously, the widening conflict across the Middle East has introduced new uncertainties affecting regional security, energy supplies and geopolitical alignments. These circumstances require a stronger federation rather than a weaker one. That objective, however, should not be confused with excessive centralisation. Strong federations are built upon responsive institutions, constitutional legitimacy and public confidence. Citizens judge the State not by constitutional theory but by whether schools function, hospitals remain open, justice is delivered promptly and basic civic services reach every district. Equally important is the responsibility of political leadership. Statements by political actors—including repeated interventions by Maulana Fazlur Rehman on constitutional and provincial questions—must be evaluated through the prism of constitutionalism rather than political confrontation. Democratic disagreement is legitimate, but constitutional discourse should unite rather than inflame an already polarised polity. The Constitution provides lawful mechanisms for reform. Political mobilisation should reinforce those mechanisms, not substitute for them.