Editorial
A federation does not survive on constitutional text alone. It survives on trust, on the feeling among ordinary citizens that their vote reaches the capital and that their region has a voice in national decisions. That feeling is now under serious threat in Pakistan.
The current federal government already governs without the political representation of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Karachi, and large parts of Balochistan’s Pashtun belt. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf claims that mandate. Whatever one thinks of that claim, it cannot be dismissed as fiction. Millions of voters made their choice visible, and that choice sits outside the federal arrangement today.
Rural Sindh is the one major constituency that the Pakistan Peoples Party carries into the coalition. It is not a small constituency. It is historically significant, geographically vast, and politically loyal. If the PPP now chooses to exit the federal government, the centre will be left representing fragments of the country rather than the country itself. That is not governance. That is an administrative shell.
The danger here is not merely political. It is structural. When people believe that neither their party nor their region has meaningful representation in Islamabad, the impulse is not to reform the system but to withdraw from it. That withdrawal takes different forms in different provinces. In Balochistan, it has taken forms that Pakistan cannot afford to repeat.
A federation held together by force of paperwork and coercive arrangements collapses slowly, then suddenly. The solution is not another round of backroom negotiations. It is transparent elections whose results are respected, and a federal government that reflects the actual political geography of Pakistan rather than the preferences of those who manage power from behind closed doors.
The centre must earn its legitimacy. It cannot simply assume it.
