The Recommend Self

Haleema Abdul Rauf I am writing to inform you that, due to the lack of electricity, we are facing many problems in our area. Without electricity, we cannot use fans, lights, the internet, or many other essential facilities. Nowadays, almost everything depends on electricity. Many poor families cannot afford solar panels because they do not have enough money or stable jobs. They also cannot afford appliances such as refrigerators. As a result, many people suffer from extreme heat, and some even become unconscious because of the high temperatures. We are facing many difficulties due to the electricity shortage. Refrigerators, lights, fans, and many modern devices all depend on electricity. Therefore, I request the government and WAPDA to ensure a proper and regular supply of electricity. Reliable electricity is very important for people’s daily lives, education, health, and work. I hope my request will be considered, and the electricity problem in our area will be resolved as soon as possible.

By Ahmad Hassan “The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other… Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: ‘I feed on your energy.’” When Frank Herbert wrote those words in his novel Dune Messiah, he observed that elaborate euphemisms are often used by the state to conceal the raw mechanics of power. In Pakistan, August 5 is observed as Youm-e-Istehsal to condemn the 2019 revocation of Article 370 and its supplementary provision, Article 35A. This act of the Indian government removed Kashmir’s separate constitution, its flag and its control over its own affairs. Last week marked seven years since that day. What began as a dramatic constitutional rupture has now, by design, become quietly normalized. Jammu and Kashmir joined India in 1947 on defined terms. The Maharaja handed over defence, foreign affairs and communications. Everything else stayed with the state. The United Nations later called for a plebiscite. It never happened. Instead, over decades, the protections that were supposed to stand in its place were worn down piece by piece, until August 5, 2019, when the government removed what remained in a single stroke. The method deserves more attention than it usually gets. Article 370 was not directly changed. First, the government reached for Article 367, which was intended to aid in the interpretation of the Constitution, and used it to redefine one phrase: “Constituent Assembly” became “Legislative Assembly.” Kashmir had no sitting assembly at the time, and the state was under President’s Rule. So, the government’s own appointee, the Governor, signed off on the change. India’s Supreme Court had already ruled, in 1959 and again in 1969, that Kashmir’s constitutional status could only be changed after the approval of the Constituent Assembly of Kashmir. When that body no longer existed, no institution had the standing to give that consent on Kashmir’s behalf. New Delhi decided that its own Governor could stand in for the people he had not been elected by. That is not consent. It is a government consenting to itself. The Indian government argued that Kashmiris had lived for decades under an insurgency that killed tens of thousands and emptied the Valley of its Pandit community in 1990. It left the region isolated from the investment and policing coordination. That argument would carry more weight if the method had matched it. What followed the revocation was not the language of integration. It was a total communications blackout, landlines and mobile networks and the internet all cut at once. Independent estimates put the troop presence at 600,000 to 800,000, roughly one soldier for every ten Kashmiris. Even pro-India politicians, former chief ministers among them, were placed under detention. Perhaps a security argument can justify counter-insurgency operations. It cannot by itself justify dissolving a state’s constitutional status, its legislature and its statehood in one move. That too with no elected Kashmiri voice given the chance to object. Jawaharlal Nehru warned Parliament about exactly this shortcut in 1952, while Article 370 was still being drafted. No clause in a constitution, he said, could substitute for the will of the Kashmiri people. Real integration, in his words, comes from the mind and the heart, not from a clause imposed from outside. Actually, there is a longer, quieter project behind the legal manoeuvre. Article 35A once barred outsiders from buying land or settling permanently in Kashmir. Since its removal, more than 3.2 million domicile certificates have gone to outsiders, most of them non-Kashmiri Hindus. This alarming thing is that wherever a disputed territory’s demographics are reshaped before its people are asked what they want, the eventual vote, if one ever comes, no longer reflects the population whose future was originally in question. None of this required an invading army, or an open declaration of intent. It required a redefined word, a signature from an appointee, and a great deal of time. The convoluted legalisms that Herbert warned about have become policy in Kashmir: development, integration, correction. Each euphemism has quietly done the work that an honest admission of purpose could never have achieved. Seven years on, Kashmir’s assembly has voted decisively against the BJP that carried out the revocation, and passed its own resolution demanding the restoration of its special status. New Delhi can easily ignore them. Yet, that very power to ignore an elected legislature proves, beyond any doubt, that the “consent” obtained seven years ago was always a legal fiction.

By Syed Tahir Rashdi  The writer is a Shahdadpur-based contributing columnist, book reviewer, and climate change activist. He holds a BS degree in Pakistan Studies from University of Sindh Pakistan’s debate over new provinces has returned with familiar demands: South Punjab, Bahawalpur, Hazara, Karachi and, periodically, proposals for a more extensive reorganisation of the federation. There are credible arguments behind some of these demands. Population growth, administrative distance, uneven development and the persistence of regional identities have altered the circumstances in which Pakistan’s present provincial arrangement was conceived. Yet the debate tends to proceed from an assumption that deserves greater scrutiny: that creating smaller provinces will, in itself, improve governance. It may. But it may also not. The distinction is important because Pakistan’s principal difficulty has never been simply the size of its administrative units. It has been the weakness, discontinuity and politicisation of the institutions through which those units are governed. This does not make the case for new provinces illegitimate. It does, however, suggest that provincial restructuring should be considered as one component of administrative reform rather than as a substitute for it. Pakistan’s provincial boundaries have never been immutable. The One Unit scheme of 1955 consolidated the western wing into a single province, partly to establish parity between the two wings of the country. It was abolished in 1970, restoring the provinces. The episode remains relevant because it demonstrated the limits of administrative engineering. A territorial arrangement can be imposed constitutionally, but its durability ultimately depends upon political legitimacy. The present debate is considerably more complex. The demand for a South Punjab province contains at least three distinct strands: the historical claim associated with Bahawalpur, the linguistic and cultural politics of Saraiki identity, and the administrative argument that the southern districts have remained distant from the provincial centre in Lahore. There is also the persistent claim of regional economic neglect. These strands should not be conflated. Similarly, the Hazara demand has a strong identity component, while the Karachi question is inseparable from the city’s unusual demographic, economic and political history and the longstanding contest over authority between urban local institutions and the provincial government. The differences matter because different problems require different institutional responses. The Constitution does not make the creation of a new province a matter of political declaration. Article 239 provides a demanding procedure for constitutional amendment, including the approval of the concerned provincial assembly where provincial boundaries are affected. That requirement is not an accidental obstacle. It reflects the logic of federalism: a federation cannot permit the territorial boundaries of one constituent unit to be altered without giving that unit a decisive constitutional voice. The experience of the parliamentary commission on new provinces in 2012 illustrated the complexity of the exercise. Questions of boundaries, resources, representation, administrative structures and constitutional amendments quickly became inseparable from the political question of who would gain or lose influence. That is why the debate deserves to be insulated, as far as possible, from electoral expediency. There is, however, a more fundamental issue that receives considerably less attention. Article 140-A of the Constitution requires provincial governments to establish local government systems and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to elected local representatives. This provision goes to the heart of the governance question. A citizen’s encounter with government is rarely with the federal government or even with a provincial assembly. It is with the school, hospital, police station, municipal authority, land office, sanitation service or local administration. Yet local governments in Pakistan have rarely acquired the institutional continuity, fiscal autonomy and political authority envisaged by the Constitution. The result is an unusual form of devolution. The 18th Amendment substantially strengthened the provinces by transferring functions and resources from the federation, but the transfer of authority has often stopped at the provincial level. Islamabad became less dominant. The provinces became stronger. The citizen did not necessarily become more powerful. This is perhaps the most important issue in the new-provinces debate. If a region is suffering because decisions are too distant from its population, the first question should be whether existing institutions can be decentralised before an entirely new tier of government is created. Comparative experience does not provide a universal answer, but it does offer useful cautions. Indonesia’s post-Suharto decentralisation transferred extensive responsibilities to subnational governments. The reform was necessary after decades of centralised rule, but decentralisation itself did not guarantee effective or accountable government. Subsequent reforms had to focus on institutional capacity, fiscal management and local accountability. Nigeria provides another caution. The creation of additional states was partly intended to improve political representation and accommodate regional interests. Yet the country continues to face substantial governance and institutional-capacity problems across its states. The lesson from both cases is not that administrative restructuring is futile. It is that territorial fragmentation and institutional development are different processes. South Africa offers a somewhat different model. Its Constitution explicitly recognises local government as a sphere of government and assigns municipalities constitutional responsibilities relating to democratic participation and service delivery. The significance lies less in the number of provinces than in the distribution of authority among the different levels of government. Switzerland’s federal tradition similarly rests on substantial cantonal and communal autonomy. Its relevance to Pakistan is not institutional imitation but a principle: government functions should be located at the level at which they can be performed most effectively, while higher levels retain responsibilities that require wider coordination. There is therefore no universally correct number of provinces. The appropriate administrative scale depends upon geography, population, fiscal capacity, the nature of the public service and, above all, institutional competence. Pakistan’s governance difficulties are familiar enough to require little elaboration: weak rule of law, politicisation of public institutions, patronage, corruption, uneven accountability, administrative discontinuity and the recurrent weakening of local government. None of these problems disappears when a provincial boundary is moved. A new province may shorten the administrative distance between a region and its provincial capital. It does not automatically make the police independent,