In a truncated Pakistan, Punjab forms about 70 percent of the population, the muhajir and Pathans about ten percent each, Sindhis 7 percent, and Baluchis 3 percent.
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As a result Sind, Baluchistan, and the NWFP find themselves in a situation of permanent disadvantage vis-a`-vis Punjab. Secession for Sindhis or Baluchis is improbable in a contiguous territory with Punjab, and any struggle for secession would be unsuccessful against one of the largest and most highly trained military establishments in the developing world. Thus, behind ethnic and provincial grievances have stood the grating reality to non-Punjabis of Punjab's political hegemony.
Baluchistan constitutes more than one-third of Pakistan's land area, but with less than five million people it remains sparsely populated. It is economically one of the most backward regions of the country, as it was in British India. The Baluchi elite has felt politically ignored and resentful that the province's vast resources, especially natural gas, have been exploited by Punjabi interests without adequate investment being made in the improvement of Baluchistan's economic infrastructure. Political alienation has fueled insurgency, the most serious being in the mid-1970s during the Bhutto regime. It was crushed brutally by the army.
Ethnic grievance in Sind, home to the seaport of Karachi, Pakistan's largest urban and financial center, exploded in 1983. The Movement for the Restoration of Democracy against the military government, though based in Sind's urban centers, mobilized the rural population as never before. Sindhis viewed Bhutto's execution as one more proof of Punjabi intolerance toward Sind and its demands for greater provincial autonomy. Bhutto was a Sindhi and, during his rule, Sind benefitted politically and economically. His ouster and death ignited Sindhi frustration eventually and directed it toward the Punjabis and their Urdu-speaking allies, the muhajir community, which control a substantial portion of business interests in the province. In response, the muhajir community organized its own political party, the Muhajir Quomi Movement (MQM), and demanded from the federal government that the areas in which muhajirs were the majority, as in the greater metropolitan area of Karachi, be designated a province.
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The NWFP has always posed a challenge to outsiders. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 added a new dimension by making Pakistan a front-line state against communist aggression and a temporary home for several million Afghan refugees. An irredentist movement among the province's Pathans to join with their kin in Afghanistan and create a Pakhtun-speaking state of their own has been always a nightmare for the ruling elite of Pakistan. One Punjabi policy of preventing such a scenario has been to favor Pathans through recruitment in the army and civil bureaucracy, and to induce greater economic linkages between Pathans and the rest of the country. This policy has worked despite the federal government's difficulties with some of the Pathan political leaders, especially those who demand greater provincial autonomy in the tradition of Khan Abdul Ghaf-far Khan and his son, Wali Khan. Moreover, Zia ul-Haq's assistance to the Afghan mujahidin during the nearly decade-long war with the Soviet Union won extensive support among the Pathans of the NWFP. The mobilization of Islamic solidarity with Afghans has also been an important factor in consolidating ties between Pathans and the rest of the country.
The transition to civilian government begun by Zia ul-Haq in 1985 moved rapidly following his death. Despite such difficulties as the dismissal of Benazir Bhutto's PPP government, elected in 1988 by the president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and reminiscent of the 1953 dismissal of Khawaja Nazimuddin's elected government and the constitutional wrangles over the authority of the president and the prime minister in the summer of 1993 between Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Nawaz Sharif, the army carefully distanced itself from the political process. It may be premature to suggest that representative democracy has taken firm roots, given the results of the 1990 and 1993 elections. The unfreezing of the political process and the emergence of a number of political parties representing regional interests with no national base, such as the MQM, may lead to a 1950s-style political gridlock. But the difference between now and then is that Punjab is constitutionally assured of its dominant place in the political system. Punjab's hegemony can now be defined and circumscribed within a legal framework, as the amended 1973 constitution does with Punjab's acquiescence, and this makes for a greater likelihood of it becoming institutionalized. Moreover, restored federalism offers the ethnic minorities (Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pathans) the political space to grow within their own ethnocultural specificity. For the muh\aµjirs, increasing assimilation into the existing ethnic mosaic remains the only viable solution. An Islamic constitution makes this assimilation more readily acceptable.
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