The Restructuring Plot Could Breakup Pakistan
The Pakistani military establishment and the political leadership of Sindh, spearheaded by President Asif Ali Zardari and his party the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), remain deeply divided over the contentious issue of provincial restructuring and the proposed administrative separation of Karachi.
This widening rift carries the dangerous potential to trigger the disintegration of Pakistan, threatening a repetition of the 1971 birth of Bangladesh. A catastrophic, unprecedented genocidal pogrom is feared if the stubborn military establishment remains bent on hacking the country’s historic provinces into over a dozen pieces. To mask this dismemberment, the establishment labels these fractured territories “Administrative Units”. In reality, they would function as the new provinces of a severely diminished Pakistan—assuming the state could even survive such a drastic, forced “surgery”.
The division of provinces under the banner of restructuring has long been a dream of the Pakistani military establishment. Critics argue it stems from a lust for centralized power aimed at subjugating Pakistan’s distinct nationalities and sub-nationalities, whose lands are rich in natural resources and earth minerals. This mindset echoes the infamous words of former Army Chief General Tikka Khan—notoriously dubbed the “Butcher of Bengal and Balochistan” for commanding brutal military operations in former East Pakistan and Balochistan—who reportedly declared: “We don’t want the people of Bengal, but the land of Bengal.” Historically, the military establishment has viewed Pakistan not for its people, but as prime real estate, leading to the widespread critique that the country’s generals operate more like real estate agents than defenders of the nation.
This exploitation dates back to the very inception of the state. Barely a year after Pakistan’s creation, Karachi was administratively separated from the rest of Sindh and annexed as the federal capital. When the then-Chief Minister of Sindh, Ayub Khuhro, fiercely opposed this separation and defended the geographical integrity of his province, he was abruptly removed from office and sent to jail.
Karachi remained separated even after the capital was later shifted to Islamabad. While popular folklore claims that the military dictator President Ayub Khan shifted the capital because Karachi’s water caused him stomach illnesses, the reality was political: his military junta feared the massive, politically volatile multitudes of the Karachi populace. Salman Rushdie famously equated Karachi to Bombay, calling both mega-cities the South Asian “rewritten versions” of New York.
Karachi was primarily built and modernized by a cosmopolitan mix of Parsis, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Sindhis, Baloch, and Gujaratis. However, its demographics were radically transformed when a massive inflow of Muslim migrants from North India—who came to be known as Mohajirs—swarmed the city after the Partition of India. Unlike Punjab, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Bengal, Sindh had never witnessed widespread Partition violence until this massive demographic shift occurred. Elements within the new migrant influx resorted to communal violence, leading to the targeted killings of Hindus and Sikhs and forcing their migration to India. In the following decades, the vibrant Jewish community of Karachi and the rest of Sindh also departed for India and Israel.
The influx of outside populations into Sindh continued unabated. General Ayub Khan once mockingly told the Mohajirs that they had nowhere left to run from Karachi, as only the open sea lay ahead of them. Karachi quickly became a sea of humanity, replacing what was once a city of just 500,000 residents, largely comprised of Sindhi Hindus. As the city attracted labor from all other provinces, it transformed into a massive economic engine, giving rise to the phrase “Mini Pakistan .”
This rapid expansion sparked a fundamental contradiction between the indigenous Sindhis and outside ethnic groups. The properties, businesses, and government jobs left behind by fleeing Sindhi Hindus were quickly occupied by the incoming migrants from India rather than local Sindhis. Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was himself a migrant from India, actively settled the majority of Mohajirs in Karachi and other urban centers of Sindh to build a loyal electoral constituency for himself.
Liaquat Ali Khan’s polarizing reign came to a sudden end when he was assassinated while addressing a public rally at Company Bagh in Rawalpindi—the powerful garrison city that houses the Pakistan Military Headquarters. He was shot dead by an assassin named Saad Akbar Babrak, who was immediately shot and killed on the spot by police. In a tragic twist of historical irony and coincidence, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated decades later in 2007 at that exact same Rawalpindi park, which had been renamed Liaquat Bagh in honor of the country’s first premier.
Conspiracy theories regarding Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination suggest a deliberate plot to establish the hegemony of the Punjabi military and civil bureaucracy, effectively dismantling early Mohajir dominance in the newly formed state. Since then, the majority of Pakistan’s military and civil leadership has hailed from the Punjab province. Although former East Pakistan initially held a larger population, its people were systematically alienated, exploited, and deprived of power by the Punjabi-dominated central government in West Pakistan. This severe economic and political alienation eventually forced the people of Bangladesh to seek separation, crossing a river of blood shed by the West Pakistani military. Consequently, the founding concept of Pakistan—the Two-Nation Theory—drowned in the Bay of Bengal, leaving the remaining provinces at the absolute mercy of the military establishment. Today, many fear the political situation in Pakistan has grown far worse than the existential crisis of 1971.
This enduring historical trauma echoes loudly in the modern slogans of Sindhi nationalists. Activists gathered around the famous “Broken Chair” monument outside the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva to chant: “Yesterday was made Bangladesh, now will be made Sindhudesh,” reclaiming the ancient sovereignty of their homeland.
The primary bone of contention today between Sindh and the military establishment, led by Army Chief General Asim Munir, is the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan. The military is heavily pushing to annul these protections through a proposed 28th Constitutional Amendment, aiming to severely curtail the financial and administrative autonomy granted to the provinces. During his first tenure as President, Asif Ali Zardari strategically passed the 18th Amendment with a two-thirds majority in both the Senate and National Assembly, significantly empowering the provinces against central overreach.
The root cause of the generals’ frustration is the National Finance Commission (NFC) Award, which guarantees that a major portion of federal revenues is distributed directly to the provinces. The military, which already consumes a massive portion of the national budget under the banner of defense, desires to divert these NFC funds back into federal coffers. Through political proxies and aligned media figures, the establishment continues to exert intense pressure on President Zardari to compromise on the 18th Amendment and back their provincial restructuring plots. Seasoned political analysts warn that capitulating to these demands would sign a death warrant for the PPP’s immense popularity and voting bloc in Sindh—the party’s core bastion of power for nearly two decades.
By pushing forward with these aggressive boundary redesigns, Pakistani generals appear to be presiding over the potential disintegration of the country. Renowned defense analyst Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa recently observed on a television broadcast that the establishment seems willing to tolerate catastrophic civil casualties in thousands to materialize their provincial restructuring schemes.
However, Sindhis view Sindh as their sacred motherland rather than a mere administrative province, and they show no intention of yielding. In response, the military has once again attempted to weaponize ethnic divisions by backing certain state-sponsored Mohajir factions against Sindhi nationalists and the provincial government, angling to detach Karachi entirely. Standing defiantly against this strategy, the Sindh Assembly has passed resolutions multiple times rejecting the proposed division of Sindh. While some establishment commentators like Mushahid Hussain float elaborate conspiracy theories alleging that the division of Pakistan’s provinces is part of “Greater Israel plot orchestrated by the United States” to weaken the country, history suggests a different reality: Pakistan has consistently been brought to the brink of collapse from within, driven by the ambitions of its own military generals and their allied political, media, and corporate elites who refuse to learn from the lessons of the past.