But what about people of FATA?

EDITORIAL:Frontier Post

The prime minister says that the people of the Seraiki belt want a separate province and not an administrative unit as proposed by the PML (N) head-honcho Mian Nawaz Sharif and that he is committed to get them want they want. But why nobody talks of the long-standing aspiration of the people of the Federally-Administered tribal areas for a province? Not even the prime minister. Is it because their cherished desire doesn’t make for gainful politics, as apparently does the Seraiki-speaking people’s?
But had the people of FATA thrown their lot with Pakistan to be consigned into a Bantustan of some kind of an apartheid state? Had they become part of Pakistan to be a segregated enclave like a black-inhabited territory in the white-ruled South Africa or Namibia? Had indeed they opted for this country to be reduced into its second-class citizens? What really is it that they remain denied of their legitimate right to become a fully-fledged province for so long?
Over these days, there is such a deafening shrill about the denial of the Baloch people’s rights. But their rights stand usurped by their sardars and chieftains, though with the state looking on collusively. But the rights of the people of FATA stand usurped by none else but by the state itself. It is the state that has kept them tied down perpetually with the tyrannical stranglehold of imperious political agents and their minions. If the native blacks in apartheid South Africa and Namibia (then christened as South West Africa) lived in their segregated Bantustans under the suffocating hegemony of authoritative white satraps, the tribal people of FATA have been consigned to live under the tyranny of brown sahibs.
And the incumbent hierarchs of Islamabad may have given themselves to the cheerful belief that they had done a great favour to the wretched people of the tribal region with the tinkering here and there with the infamous Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), a living legacy of the British colonial rule. But that could only be a big joke with a people, craving for a treatment as citizens equal in every manner to their compatriots in the rest of the country. And they are really miffed if the erstwhile Northern Areas despite all the international complications could become an autonomous Gilgit-Baltistan with its own governor, own elected legislature and government and a multi-layered judiciary, why the provincial status is not being conferred on them when they are internationally-known as part and parcel of Pakistan?
Arguably, apart from political argumentations, there may be some sticking points about forming a Seraiki province. But FATA’s case for a province suffers from no such infirmity. It is a compact unit in every manner — geographically, demographically, ethnically, racially, linguistically, and administratively. And it is a richly-endowed land, with enormous untapped mineral resources, great agricultural potentials, tremendous industrial prospects, and, above all, hardworking people with a huge reservoir of talented youth. Had indeed the region been transformed into a province, it would have long been sucked fully into the national mainstream and saved of extremism that has come to blight it due to its decades-long uninterrupted seclusion.
The bane of the FATA people’s aspiration for a province has throughout been that at no point in time they have had their true spokesmen to articulate their hope and expectations. Those who make to the parliament as members of the National Assembly and Senate as their representatives are no real. They are fakes and charlatans. They ride to the parliament on the piles of their riches. They buy their memberships in the auction mart. And once in place, they set about recouping their capital investment in the venture and making more fortunes on it. It is not the people’s interests that they serve. It is their own personal interests that they serve.
This should be more than evident, at least now, to any objective watcher of the region from their abominable listlessness and a silent-spectator’s role in the campaign for subduing the still-raging militancy in parts of the tribal areas. They seem behaving as if militancy is not blighting their areas but the country’s some other part. Sporadically, and only sporadically, they are seen on some media channel either whining or sulking feigningly or trotting out obscene lame excuses for their passivity in dousing the flames of extremism and militancy. On the ground, where they should be seen active dynamically, they are more conspicuous for total absence than for even token presence. More horribly, some reportedly buy their own and their families’ safety by paying up the militants.
Still, the existing system suits both the so-called tribal parliamentarians and the Islamabad hierarchs. To the tribal parliamentarians, it affords all the opportunities for self-enrichment by political blackmailing of the Islamabad hierarchs. And to the Islamabad hierarchs, it affords all the opportunities to muster up the requisite parliamentary support at crucial junctures by throwing the crumbs of material allurements to the tribal parliamentarians. The treachery is nonetheless mutual and self-centred.
But if making of FATA a province was compelling previously, it is inviolable and indispensable presently — to keep the tribal people on the side of the Pakistani state staunchly and marginalise extremists and militants irreversibly. The prime minister should take time out from his Seraiki spell to know this in the nation’s greater interest.