FATA: A welcome change

EDITORIAL: Frontier Post

In a welcome move, party chief Asfandyar Wali Khan has appreciably signalled renunciation of his ANP’s long-held stance of merging the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and acceptance of the tribal people’s inalienable right to decide if to become this province’s part or a separate province of their own. And there is no ambiguity whatsoever about their will. Never ever have the tribal people asked for any such merger. It is only the ANP that has been pressing for it, and that too quite untenably, rather irrationally. Indeed, the very basis of ethnicity and linguistic affinity that the party had been flaunting to advance its case on FATA has now landed it into hot water. This very criterion now the Hazara region’s residents are touting up to be partitioned off from KP and turned into a separate province.The tribal people are, verily, a very wronged people to the point of utter degradation and deprivation. Volitionally and happily, they had thrown their lot with Pakistan, owing full allegiance to the Pakistani State and expecting to be treated as equally as their compatriots in rest of the country. But the snooty officialdom of the Pakistani State had other ideas in its brain. For reasons best known to it, it quarantined them as some kind of a wild people, not amenable to civilised ways and unfit to modernity and progress. For decades, they were kept denied of development, thus depriving them of the means to grow economically and consequently advance socially and politically. The brief break in this long spell of official neglect on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s watch was not much of it as he too latterly lost much of his steam in introducing the tribal people to economic development. As such, for them it has been more or less a colonial dispensation for the most part, with just a change in the complexion of rulers’ faces from the white of the British to the brown of the natives. Even now, there is not much of a change. The fiddling with the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), of which the incumbent hierarchy is making so much, is really no big deal. Of course, the draconian law has been their great tormentor. And sour they are over it. But it is not just tinkering with this law that had been their dying aspiration. It could be of an uninformed officialdom and an ignorant civil society. Their cherished dream goes far beyond. What they actually have been aspiring for is to be the masters of a system where they make their laws in accordance with their particular needs, demands and hopes, formulate programmes, schemes and plans for their economic advancement and social emancipation, and execute their laws and development agendas as do their rest of the compatriots.Nor were they ever hankering for any political parties act’s extension to their region. That indeed was the political parties’ demand. Not theirs. Of course, this restriction had played to the rightist parties’ advantage and to the others’ disadvantage. Despite the restriction, the rightists for their religious garb had a free access to the region’s pulpit to peddle their religiosity, which some blame, perhaps not wrongly, no lesser for the deeply-ingrained conservatism in the area. But had they been sucked into the national mainstream, the tribal people would have forked out into a multiplicity of political hues and stripes like their other compatriots, and in all probability had formed up their own political parties and groups. But since they were denied entry into the mainstream, they have remained captive to their own firebrand rabble-rousers and guests using their pulpit. Their own grandees who make to the parliament could by no stretch be construed political substitutes for them. These eminences all know buy out their memberships and then set out to recoup their investments and make hefty returns on their capital. But the time has certainly come when instead of playing hanky-panky with them, their citizenship of this country as equal, no lesser, compatriots should be recognised in substance and respected in content. A province they should become forthwith at any rate. Once they are a province, an inspiring sense of ownership and a creative sense of responsibility will add up to impel them to chart out their lives anew to move forward politically and give their region a new shape economically and socially, no lesser by exploiting its tremendous natural wealth, particularly its believably immense mineral, oil and gas riches. The army may presently be engaged appreciably in developing the region. But it is no there to stay for ever. Once it is done with its pacification campaign, it will be gone back to its barracks. It is the tribal people who are to stay there for ever, generations after generations. And it is they alone who can give permanence to the region’s rebuilding and reshaping. Let them become a province, with their own elected assembly, elected government, own governor and bureaucracy, and then do the miracle. Yet, appallingly, when there is so much of contentious noise about new provinces, there is not even whimper for a legitimate FATA province. No parliamentary resolution has been tabled for its creation. Will the mindset of our opportunist politicos and snooty officialdom ever change?