The demand for new provinces in Pakistan consistently provokes significant political anxiety. Proposals for administrative division often encounter intense resistance from majority ethnic groups, who regard existing provincial boundaries as sacred and historically significant homelands.
The debate over administrative restructuring exposes a deeper structural flaw within the Pakistani state, which is a rigid dichotomy between an imposed state nationalism and entrenched sub-national ethnolinguistic hegemonies. In this ongoing contest between ‘Pakistaniat’ and dominant ethnic identities, numerous indigenous minority communities – spanning from the Hindu Kush-Karakoram ranges in the north to the southern coastal belts – are systematically excluded from the national discourse.
Understanding the volatility surrounding the creation of new provinces requires an examination of the concerns of Pakistan’s five dominant ethnolinguistic groups: Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis, Baloch and Mohajirs. Each group’s relationship to provincial boundaries is shaped by historical trauma, fears of demographic marginalisation, and competition for federal resources allocated through the National Finance Commission (NFC) Award.
In Sindh, the demand for a separate province for the Urdu-speaking urban population – or even the administrative division of Karachi – is met with passionate, existential resistance from Sindhi nationalists. For Sindhis, the undivided geography of Sindh is tied to thousands of years of continuous civilisation. Any proposal to carve out urban Sindh is perceived as an attempt to reduce indigenous Sindhis to a minority in their own historical homeland, a fear compounded by decades of internal migration.
In Balochistan, ethnic tension between the Baloch majority in the south and the Pashtun population in the north creates a stalemate. While Pashtuns in northern Balochistan regularly advocate for a separate ‘Pakhtunkhwa’ province or merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Baloch leadership fiercely opposes any division of their territorial expanse. For the Baloch, whose political narrative is dominated by state heavy-handedness, resource extraction and peripheral alienation, territorial division is viewed as a state-sponsored attempt to fragment their national struggle.
In the north-west, Pashtun nationalism historically sought the amalgamation of Pashtun-majority areas, achieved partly through the merger of the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Yet, within Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Hazara region’s Hindko-speaking population regularly demands a separate Hazara province, citing political and economic dominance by the Pashtun core.
Meanwhile, in Punjab, the demographic and political centre of gravity, the demand for a Saraiki province in the south has obtained considerable momentum. However, central and northern Punjabi political elites have historically resisted partitioning the province, knowing that a unified Punjab guarantees overwhelming dominance in the National Assembly and the federal bureaucracy.
A critical distortion emerges in the national debate. Political discourse often treats these five major groups as if they represent the entirety of Pakistan. This majoritarian perspective disregards the numerous minority ethnic and linguistic communities who exist as peripheral subjects within these larger provincial entities.
Whether it is the Brahui, Lasi, or Hazara in the south, or the ancient Dardic and Trans-Himalayan communities in the north, including the Torwali, Khowar, Shina, Burushaski, Balti, Kohistani, Gawri, Kalasha, Wakhi, Yidgha and Gujari, etc, minority ethnicities find themselves doubly marginalised. They are governed by a distant federal state that demands cultural homogenisation and administered locally by provincial capitals dominated by provincial majorities.
This systemic erasure is actively reinforced by the state’s official mechanisms of counting and recognition, nowhere more evident than in the national census. As sociolinguist Tariq Rahman meticulously documents in ‘Language and Politics in Pakistan’, language and ethnic identity in Pakistan are deeply political, serving as the primary vehicles for organising counter-hegemonic movements against central state authority. Yet, the state’s official census form embodies a serious ambiguity regarding ethnic identity.
In the national census, there is no column for ‘ethnicity’ or ‘nationality’ other than legal state citizenship, where options are restricted to rigid political categories such as ‘Pakistani’, ’ Afghan ’, or ‘Chinese’. The state explicitly refuses to recognise sub-national ethnic identity on an official level, operating under the ideological assumption that accepting ethnic nationality threatens the fragile construct of Pakistaniat, an ideology formulated during the Cold War that equated national unity with a single religion and a single national language.
Because the state refuses to count ethnic identity directly, the mother tongue has become the sole legal proxy for ethnic nationalism in Pakistan.
Consequently, the language column in the census form is no longer a neutral linguistic query; it is a high-stakes political battleground. Ethnic groups recognise that their political power, share of federal resources, parliamentary representation and provincial bargaining power depend directly on the number of people recorded as speaking their language.
This dynamic produces two significant crises. First, majority nationalities in provinces like Sindh become deeply alarmed when the question arises of inserting new, distinct languages into the census data. The recognition of additional languages is viewed not as a triumph of cultural diversity, but as a demographic threat designed to alter provincial power balances.
Second, because the state historically listed only a handful of major languages – such as Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, Urdu and Saraiki – minority language communities were systematically forced to mark their mother tongue under the category of ‘Other’ or under any one of the languages listed in the form. This way, it reduces a community’s language to an uncounted ‘Other’ and renders them politically invisible. It deprives them of mother-tongue education, state media representation and local administrative autonomy.
When smaller linguistic groups in northern Pakistan advocate for their mother tongues to be enumerated in national surveys, they are met with administrative indifference from the centre and suspicion from provincial capitals, who view linguistic assertion as a step towards territorial demands.
This systemic refusal to accommodate ethnolinguistic diversity has created a perpetual crisis of governance. By treating the demand for new provinces as a treasonous threat to state nationalism, or by allowing provincial majorities to suppress internal minorities, the Pakistani state reinforces the very alienation it seeks to prevent.
To overcome persistent cycles of ethnic conflict, Pakistan must fundamentally reconsider its concept of federalism. Administrative restructuring and the creation of new provinces should not be perceived solely as threats to state integrity, nor should these processes be dominated by majoritarian ethnic elites.
Genuine federalism necessitates moving beyond the binary of centralised Pakistaniat and provincial majoritarianism. It requires an administrative framework that acknowledges regional self-determination, decentralises authority to local levels, and ensures constitutional rights, linguistic preservation, and equitable resource distribution for all communities in Pakistan, not solely those with significant political influence. Unless the state recognises and respects its full diversity, the issue of new provinces will persist as a source of national discord.
