The Trouble with Punjabi Dominance in Pakistan

While it is well known that India contains a plethora of different ethnic groups and languages, the same is also true of neighboring Pakistan. Pakistan may seem homogenous at first glance – it has a state religion, Islam, which is followed by 95 percent of its population, and a national language, Urdu. Pakistan is nevertheless a cornucopia of ethnic rivalries, just like its larger neighbor.

But while India has found an uneasy compromise among its various ethnicities – by instituting 22 official languages, allowing English to remain co-official with Hindi at the national level, and dividing its territory into linguistically coherent states – Pakistan simmers with tensions between its provinces, especially between Punjab, its largest province, and the rest.

Slightly more than half of Pakistan’s population lives in Punjab; in contrast, Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, is home to about a sixth of the country’s population. On the basis of demographics alone, this is enough for Punjab to dominate Pakistan’s politics and economy. Additionally, the state is the heartland of the military establishment, which wields enormous power in the country’s affairs, and also contains the cultural capital of Lahore. (Pakistan’s movie industry, Lollywood, takes its name from this city.) Finally, Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, while administratively separate from Punjab, was carved out of a portion of its north.

While several major figures in Pakistan are not Punjabi – General Pervez Musharraf, the general-turned-president, is Muhajir, the descendants of refugees who went to Pakistan from India after the partition; the Zardari-Bhutto family are Sindhi landlords; and Imran Khan is Pashtun – for the most part the Pakistani establishment figures are Punjabis, including the country’s current prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and its powerful chief of army staff,  General Raheel Sharif.

Interestingly, Punjabis have not embraced their mother tongue, Punjabi, as the national language of the country they dominate, a case analogous to the Javanese of Indonesia, who promoted Bahasa Indonesia instead of their own tongue. Instead, Punjabis have been strong proponents of Urdu, which is universally understood despite being the mother tongue of fewer than 10 percent of Pakistan’s population. Urdu, which originated around Delhi, is the mother tongue of the Muhajirs and it the traditional lingua franca of the subcontinent’s Muslims. Nonetheless, its universal imposition bred and still breeds resentment, especially in Balochistan, and was a factor in Bangladesh's secession in 1971.

After Punjab, Sindh province has the most influence on mainstream politics and culture, as the home of the Bhutto family and the stronghold of the Muhajirs in Karachi. Both Punjab and Sindh are agricultural, settled provinces along the Indus river and its tributaries that long belonged to the “Indic” sphere of civilization. This is in contrast to the western, more tribal provinces of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan, inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns and Baloch, respectively. The far northeastern administrative region of Gilgit-Baltistan is sparsely populated and extremely remote, and much of it is inhabited by the Balti, a Shia Tibetan ethnic group.

Resentment

The dominance of the people along the Indus in national affairs, especially the Punjabis, has been resented by all of Pakistan’s other ethnic groups since independence. Balochistan, in particular, has been in a state of unrest since Pakistan’s independence, as its people fear being swamped by Punjabis. Other regions in Pakistan, however, also feel this resentment, which in recent times has extended beyond issues of linguistics and culture to security and economic development.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Pakistan’s security situation steadily worsened. But despite predictions that the country would fall apart or come under Taliban rule, Punjab preserved the country’s core and the country remained stable. Punjab suffered less from terrorism or violent incidents than Pakistan’s other provinces, especially KP, despite the region being home to many terrorist outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. This prompted accusations that Punjab, led by Nawaz Sharif’s brother Shahbaz Sharif, was getting favorable anti-terrorism treatment, and that the Pakistani government was outsourcing terrorists to other provinces in Pakistan under an implicit understanding that as long as Punjab remains stable, the government will not move against extremists. Strangely, after Shahbaz Sharif appealed to terrorists to not attack Punjab in 2010, the attacks largely ceased.

Punjab has implemented more steps of the National Action Plan (NAP) against terrorism than any other province in Pakistan, and the state has firm control over the province. On the other hand, large parts of Balochistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), and KP remain lawless, and the military has been accused of failing to prevent attacks against ethnic and religious minorities in those regions, despite being equipped to do so. Even those who don’t believe that terrorists are being used by the military in other provinces point to the relative stability of Punjab to demonstrate that the country’s political and economic system only caters to that province. For example, according to government data published in Dawn, a leading Pakistani newspaper, in 2015, under the NAP, “5,487 search operations were conducted in Punjab, 322 in Sindh, 1,223 in KP, 12 in Balochistan, and 275 in Islamabad and in these raids, 33,591 people were monitored in Punjab, 2,887 in KP, 20 in Balochistan, and 484 in Islamabad.”

Uneven economic development is another area where other provinces resent Punjab and also Sindh. The majority of Pakistan’s economic activity takes place in these two provinces, which have been built up for centuries, and were industrialized during the British Raj. Similarly, railroads and other transportation links are better developed in the east than the west and the business community is mostly concentrated in Punjab or in Karachi, in Sindh. More than 70 percent of small-scale manufacturing in the country takes place in Punjab. 

Pakistan’s other provinces and regions resent Punjab and the fact that until 2009, the lion’s share of economic development occurred there, despite the need for development being greater everywhere else. Moreover, Pakistani government policies are seen as favoring Punjabis in the acquisition of land and resources throughout the country, a fact that is especially resented in Balochistan, the province with the greatest concentration of natural resources. Baloch politicians and rebels frequently see Punjabi settlers in Balochistan as colonial exploiters who steal its mineral and gas wealth and send it back to be used in industry in Punjab. This has led to frequent attacks on Punjabis in Balochistan. Even Sindh, which is not as neglected as the west, has complained about a developmental inequality that favors Punjab; some Punjabi cities have mass transit and digitized records while Karachi remains bloated and rural Sindh faces food shortages.

The story of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) acutely demonstrates the tensions between Pakistan’s provinces. Part of China’s effort to construct transportation infrastructure throughout Asia, CPEC is designed to connect western China with the port city of Gwadar, in Balochistan, near Iran. The corridor was supposed to pass through KP and Balochistan, bringing much needed infrastructure to these regions. However, in April 2015, a new route was revealed showing the road now passing through the safer, eastern part of Pakistan, including Islamabad and Lahore. This led to an accusation on the part of KP’s chief minister that the route had been changed to benefit Punjabi interests. And even though the new route still passes through southern Balochistan before arriving at Gwadar, many Baloch fear it will be used as a corridor for further Punjabi settlement and exploitation of Balochistan, made all the worse by Chinese economic might backing it. The very fact that Pakistan will deploy a special force of 10,000 troops to protect Chinese interests along CPEC is telling of the level of Baloch resentment against it. As long as Baloch interests are disregarded, development in Balochistan will lead to resentment rather than better relations between the state and Punjab. It is unlikely that resentment against Punjab will lead to the breakup of the Pakistani state. The military is too dominant to allow that to occur and, when serious threats have arisen in the past, such as the Taliban takeover of Swat in 2009, it has acted decisively to prevent non-state actors from seizing and holding territory. Moreover, the domination of the country by Punjabis is not the result of a nefarious conspiracy, but a result of long-standing demographics and patronage networks perpetuating themselves. As a result, many non-Punjabis have successfully entered the mainstream establishment, and there are elected politicians from all of Pakistan’s provinces participating in the decision-making process in the civilian government and military. Yet Punjabi interests continue to prevail in the national policy agenda, despite some small changes that have been made to spread development throughout the country. With its growth overly concentrated in one province, Pakistan is unlikely to be able to emulate the developmental and growth statistics of neighboring India. Moreover, unless significantly different economic and political policies are pursued, Pakistan will continue to see resentment, tension, and violence simmer in its west.