AT PENPOINT The revision of provincial boundaries is so delicate a subject that it has not been attempted at all in Pakistan, though it has been tried after Independence in India, without ultimate success, in the form of achieving finality. The Indian example is apposite, not just because of the cultural and administrative similarities that make them comparable, but because this is one area in which there has been a clearly defined difference between the two states. India has been making and unmaking states from partition, while Pakistan engaged in only one experiment with revising provincial boundaries, not as an end in itself, but as a solution to the East Bengal question, and which was reversed. The problem was worse in India, for it should be noted that revision of state boundaries was initially part of the Congress policy towards the princely states. These states were part of the policy of indirect rule, and the princes were in treaty relationships with the British monarch, in which internal affairs were their responsibility, though under the supervision of a British resident, who would even be full time for large states, or double up as a civil officer in small states. Some states were directly under the Viceroy, but the majority under the provincial governors. Pakistan did not inherit many states, though its main dispute with India is over the fate of a princely state, Kashmir. At partition, states were supposed to accede to one of the new dominions of India or Pakistan, and they acceded as expected, except for some, like Kashmir, Hyderabad and Tripura, wanted independence. All were absorbed forcibly by India, with Kashmirs accession going to the UN Security Council and it being determined that the people would determine which country to join through a UN-supervised plebiscite. That plebiscite has not been held yet, because of Indian intransigence, despite the uprising of the Kashmiri people, and three wars with Pakistan. However, soon after the partition, the Indian government both absorbed the states and reorganised provincial boundaries on linguistic lines. One result was the Punjab States Agency, created in 1930, and of which Bahawalpur and Khairpur states had acceded to Pakistan, and which had the Hill States Agency created out of it in 1936, was absorbed into the Punjab. Punjab itself had been portioned in 1947, but the Indian part was further broken into five: the states of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana, with the latter two sharing a common capital in Chandigarh, which became union territory, as did Delhi, which had been a district of the old Punjab. Otherwise of the eight states unions, Pakistan had inherited two, the Baluchistan States Union and the North-West Frontier States Union. However, the states were left alone, and their absorption was not into any province of Pakistan at independence, but into the new province of West Pakistan, which came into existence in 1958 when East Bengal, another province cut out from a former British Indian province, became East Pakistan. However, the arrangement was not to last, and one of the acts of the Yahya government was to end the One Unit, which meant not just the recreation of the four provinces that made it up, but also the absorption of all princely states in one of the provinces. Thus, the provinces which adopted the 1973 Constitution were not the ones that obtained independence, but included former princely states. An additional factor had been Karachi. Designated the federal capital until Ayub Khan shifted it to Islamabad, it had been until 1958 also the capital of Sindh. Karachi was thus made a separate federating unit, a position which disappeared with the One Unit and when it re-emerged after its break-up as the capital of the reconstituted province of Sindh. It is noticeable that one of the pressures for a new province comes from the old Bahawalpur state, now a Punjab civil division under the same name. This is called a Seraiki province, even though there are two objections to that. First, a Seraiki province would have centred around Multan, the capital of the Multan Subah under the Mughals, but a civil division under the British. Then, the language question: Seraiki is a dialect of Punjabi, and not a full-fledged language in its own right. If there is a case for a Punjabi Seraiki province, there would be one for a Sindhi Seraiki one too. However, it should be remembered that while the Punjabi and Sindhi are two separate languages, their Seraikis are like enough to be intelligible to speakers of the other, to the extent that Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, a Punjabi, and Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, a Sindhi, spoke to one another in Seraiki, understanding the others dialect perfectly. Separating Karachi from Sindh would revive the old separation, though it would leave no provision for the capital of Sindh, unless that is shifted to Hyderabad, which has already been proposed. An apparent problem is that Hyderabad, though already in many ways the cultural capital of Sindh, also has a Mohajir majority. No partition plan for Sindh would be able to do anything about its capital. There are three reasons for the pressing of the demand to the extent that mainstream politicians are contributing. The first is that the people of the area have opted for the idea, which gained currency around the time the NWFP was renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It should be remembered that the old Hazara division, which is Hindko-speaking, does not want a name which makes the province Pakhtun, and one solution has been to demand a separate province. The second has been the need to break up one particular province, the Punjab, which has more than half of the population of the country. The third reason is the PPP belief that it would be better placed to form the government in new Seraiki-speaking provinces. This is based on the elections where the PPP has formed the central government. However, it should be noted that when the PPP has lost federally, it has also done so in the Seraiki belt, so the PPP rule is not guaranteed there. It would be useful to note what happened with Indias largest state, Uttar Pradesh, which had states carved out of it, not so much on linguistic grounds, though they were also claimed, as to develop. This is a plea that is being made in Pakistan, though the development will first come in expensive facilities for ministers and officials of the new provinces. While talk is easy, there are the constitutional requirements for changes, which not only require amendment to the Constitution, but also passage by a resolution of two-thirds of the affected provincial assemblies. There have to be good reasons for members, and more importantly the government, to cut down the province, in which it already has a majority. Those reasons do not seem to exist, and so Pakistan should be left to continue on its present course of not revising the boundaries it was created with. Email: maniazi@nation.com.pk We are grateful to the newspaper for what it has revealed. But there are very many things under the Pakistani skies, which have remained hidden from its searching eye. Lets reveal to the newspaper one of the gravest secrets, which its political microscope has failed to detect. If most of our public representatives do not pay income tax, most of them do not utter a single word in Parliament during their entire term of office. They keep their wisdom hermetically sealed within their chests. They keep absolutely mum. And for this absolute silence, they are paid exactly what the most vociferous members are paid. In Pakistan, complete silence fetches the same price which the most rhetorical speeches fetch. Politically, complete dumbness is as valuable for us as the noisiest of noise. The public representative, who keeps his mouth eternally shut inside Parliament, keeps his hands eternally wide open for receiving his remuneration cheques for his 100 percent pure silent performance. The sage, who discovered that silence is gold, must have stumbled upon his discovery in Pakistan. Electioneering in Pakistan is a tremendously expensive business. Every candidate for a parliamentary seat must spend huge sums of money. (We spend as much on our elections as America spends on it Tomahawk missiles.) The more a candidate spends, the brighter his chances of victory. If a candidate is defeated, all his money goes down the drain. He is financially wrecked. Can a financially ruined man be asked to pay income-tax? If a candidate wins, his first moral obligation to himself is to recover all his election investments with interest. Recovering huge sums of money from a miserable national economy is a very prolonged process. Unfortunately, the elected representative is given a nearly five-year time period within which to recover all his election expenses. Naturally, all his waking hours are spent in recovering his election money. Equally, naturally, he forgets all about his income tax affairs. It is a most honest unintentional forgetfulness. Can an unintentional forgetfulness about ones income tax affairs be regarded as a criminal offence? The writer is an academic.