Hazara violence

How ironic that the entire edifice of the 102-clause 18th Amendment is at risk of crumbling under the weight of a single issue: renaming the North-West Frontier Province. The Bill for the proposed amendment, as passed by the National Assembly, is now before the Senate, waiting to be legislated, but the work that was so much cheese only last week, is now a hard chalk.
But this was a terrible week. The new name for the province, Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa - essentially an invention of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) which had swept polls in this region in the last general elections - is not acceptable to the Hazara residents. They are on the streets for the last many days, voicing their rejection of what their leadership had proposed. Theirs have been largely rowdy, but peaceful protests - until this Monday when in clashes with police, seven died and about a hundred were wounded by gunfire. The anger still seethes all over the mountainous Hazara Division, where the political leadership is fast losing control of the streets to angry mobs.
So deep appears to be their resentment that even if the Senate passes the Bill as it is, there is absolutely no possibility of the people from this area agreeing to live with their new provincial identity. If the statements, by the local leaders after the firing incident are any guide, one fears from now on ethnicity is going to rule this part of the country. Tellingly, some of them charged that the ANP government in Peshawar had sent hardcore Pushtun police from Mardan and Charsadda to fire at the demonstrators, because the local police were not willing to 'shoot-to-kill' ordered by the provincial government.
In the worst-case scenario, the 18th Amendment is not getting legislated, bringing everything back to square one. One would be extremely reluctant to underestimate the political sincerity of the 27-member parliamentary committee in its commitment to recover the pristine glory of the Constitution, but the fact cannot be overlooked that it was too gargantuan a task to be undertaken in one go. No doubt about the fact that sometimes a constitutional amendment would take only a few hours, but it is also true that such a legislative work may take years and decades.
Perhaps too much of the focus of the committee was on securing consensus, than on going into the nitty-gritty of the impact and import the proposed constitutional changes would have on the status quo. As we said in these pages last week, the committee had assumed that renaming NWFP was as an issue only between the ANP and PML (N), but that was a wrong assumption. With hindsight, the two of them must now realise that they were too presumptive and detached from the reality on the ground - giving weight to a perception that polls in Pakistan are too superficial to be truly reflective of their voters' aspirations.
Not only the fate of the 18th Amendment hangs in balance, the long-simmering demand for more provinces has come to the fore. The Hazara Division people are now demanding a separate provincial status for their region, while similar demands were already being aired from a number of other places. And if Nawaz Sharif has been correctly reported in a recent press interview, he, too, now appears amenable to the concept of more provinces. That may be a realistic appraisal of the obtaining situation, but the time has not yet arrived for such a drastic redrawing of the national map.
The problem at hand is too serious and needs all the stakeholders to be focused on it. In the spirit of 'a stitch in time that saves nine' the government must immediately call an APC, inviting all parties, both inside and outside the parliament, to find a way out of this constitutional impasse. May be the name proposed by Chaudhry Nisar Ali, Hazara-Pakhtoonkhwa, for the NWFP receives acceptance from all sides - the window is not yet completely shut.