FATA's orphanhood

The Frontier Post

Had it not been for politics, the town talk would certainly have been not a Seraiki subah but a FATA subah, so compelling, so justifiable and so legitimate is it. Even if the administrative criterion is the yardstick, the region measures up to it perfectly befittingly. The FATA is a compact administrative unit, being administered as such all along. No administrative hitches or complications accordingly stand in the way of upgrading it to the status of a fully-fledged province. No shuffling, shifting or transfers of officials or assets is involved; no bickering over contentious apportionment of resources is entailed. A native bureaucratic apparatus is in place that administers government allocation of the funds for the region in accordance with laid down systems and procedures.
In the event of FATA becoming a province, no dislocations, hassles and disputes would thus take place, as would it be if any other region is carved off from the existing provinces to acquire a new subah's status. Only, the signboards on buildings housing government departments and offices in the region will have to be repainted and the officials' nameplates will have to be rewritten bearing designations particular to the province, like political agents being mentioned as district coordination officers and so on. Furthermore, the FATA Secretariat will have only to be lifted out of its implausible abode from Peshawar and relocated at a central place inside the region itself to form up an embryonic apparatus to expand latterly into an appropriate provincial secretariat.
Yet, in spite of all these inbuilt administrative pluses, the region stays denied of its rightful claim to provincial status, for no plausible reason except lame excuses. Had indeed FATA become a province long ago and part of the mainstream, it would have been a potent agent of national progress and prosperity. Its tremendous natural wealth, now lying largely untapped, would have been explored and exploited for the nation's greater good. Its virgin agriculture would have been developed to serve the nation as a granary of food and fruits. But, alas, such a tremendous promise for national growth was let go waste by snooty officialdoms and foolish leaderships all along. And the region was left to sink in backwardness, primarily because it had had no champions, even among its own elites, to espouse its very legitimate cause of provincial status.
Appallingly, even now it has no fathers to speak up for it. While its own parliamentarians at times mew feebly, albeit only for form's sake, the mainstream political class has visibly no time for it, whereas it should be considerably engaged with it in its own interest. Of course, tribal parliamentarians have no incentive or temptation to press for provincial status of FATA. The region's existing position suits them lucratively. It enhances their shelf value and sales prospects to accumulate personal riches by trading in their political loyalties at a price. But by neglecting the cause of a FATA subah, the mainstream political class is shooting itself in the foot. With deep inroads into the region's huge populace, various political strands could have competitively built up there their large support bases, as they do in the provinces. But now with their own foible, they are losing out on a crucial vote-bank that could stand them in good stead at their critical hours.
In fact, with their disinterest they are keeping the doors wide open to the rightist political strands to garner up all the support in the region and spread their religiosity and conservatism freely, too. With an easy access to the pulpit there, the rightists have gained a clear advantage over their political adversaries. Had indeed the political class been not so disengaged and had it worked for turning FATA into a province, not only would have the moderate and centrist political strands created their own constituencies of public support there but also put a brake on the spread of conservatism that has come so handy to the militants to promote their thuggish trades so willfully. Predictably, the region would have been a place of peace and tranquility, as indeed had it been for decades, and there would been no mass-scale populace of the internally-displaced that is now wandering around haplessly because of the military's pacification operations amid the FATA civilian administration's complete apathy to look after them.
But will this orphanhood of FATA ever end? The portents sadly are not sanguine. If the mainstream political class is demonstrably disinterested, the commentariat and civil society are driven only by their ignorance of the region and its residents' real aspirations. The Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) which they seem thinking to be the real problem of the region is in fact just an insignificancy in the greater scheme of things its residents have in their minds. The FCR is certainly an issue; but not the issue. The issue is becoming a fully-fledged province, not get merged in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, as ignoramuses think merely on the basis of ethnicity. And the residents are really sour as to what sin had they committed by volitionally becoming part of Pakistan that while lesser cases are being pressed fervently for provincial status they are being kept deprived of it despite all the legitimacy, rightfulness and justifiability of their cause.