Why Seraikis demand a separate province?

Amir Hussaini

I belong to an Urdu-speaking family that migrated from India at the time of Partition, but I too feel the victimisation of the federal and provincial establishment due to my domicile in the district of Khanewal in Multan Division.
I was reading Punjab Under Imperialism from 1885 to 1947 written by Dr. Imran Ali who teaches at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. In the book, he has analyzed the history of canalization and colonization by British rulers in six districts of western Punjab that brought demographic changes in those six districts where the native population was given a bad name of “Barber” or “Jangli” by the British colonials. They registered a majority of these so-called barbers as a non- farming caste, thus depriving them of cultivated agricultural lands. 
Instead of the native population, other castes were brought in and resettled from eastern and central Punjab which changed the demography of these districts. Okara, Sahiwal, and Jhang were totally changed, with new towns and new villages being established in which settlers were privileged over the resident population.
In my view, this may have been where the seeds of a different cultural identity were sown for Seraiki-speaking people, although at the time no such distinguished cultural entity existed. It was due to the social engineering of colonial masters, although crushing the cultural identity of this region was not the objective of the British rulers but only a secondary result of their engineering. The British were re-designing the administration system of all of India for reasons of control to better extract cotton which was the need of the newly developed textile industry in Britain.
But the effect of this colonial policy was the backwardness of the Seraiki region. I call this process the “red indianization of the Seraiki people”. The British redrew the boundaries of the provinces and carved out a new province of the Punjab from what was formerly Multan. The British helped the Nawab of Bahawalpur to re-consolidate his princely state to control Sindh and to teach a lesson to rebellious Rajasthanis who were creating problems for the colonial masters.
During the Sutlaj valley project in 1922, the British again redistributed cultivated agricultural land to settlers from eastern Punjab.  Seraiki-speaking people had entered late into the formal education system, so they could not get a share of jobs in government. They had no share in the Indian Civil Service compared to those who could speak Punjabi. After the British, the industrial infrastructure of the newly-born State of Pakistan was weak in general but particularly so in the Seraiki region, so the infrastructure of civil service had an imbalance in terms of ethnicity, language and cultural identity with the new ruling class comprising Punjabi and Urdu speaking officers.
There was no attempt to redress the balance and improve the representation from other parts of the Punjab. Instead, it deepened over time, especially when General Ayub imposed One-Unit system which favoured those already within the power nexus. The objective of this act was to counter the majority of Bengalis, but again its side effect was undermining the Seraiki region.
Today, Punjab has nine divisions with 96.6 million people, including 32 million people residing in three divisions of the Seraiki belt. It is 31.26 per cent of the total population of the Punjab, but their share in federal services is just nine per cent. There are 1086 officers from the Punjab in the All Pakistan Unified group, including 338 from Lahore(31 per cent), 149 from Gujranwala, 146 from Rawalpindi, 129 from Faisalabad, 105 from Surgodha, 63 from Sahiwal, 73 From Multan (the third largest populated division of Punjab), 43 D G Khan and 73 from Bahawalpur. 
Three divisions of Seraiki belt have just 157 officers out of 1086 which makes it 14.5 per cent instead of the 31.26 per cent it is entitled to. In the provincial government services, nine divisions have 127,876 government employees. Six divisions have 109,505 government employees but only 18,131 are from three divisions of the Seraiki region. These figures have been taken from reports of the establishment division and policy research wing of the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, and they highlight the imbalance in representation in federal and provincial services.
My friend in Multan, an information officer, says that the seniority list of officers from these three divisions has changed and many of them are likely to be promoted soon if new provinces are established. He believes that the demand of a Seraiki province is not only on the basis of cultural identity etc. but must also be seen in the context of promotions and seniority lists. This includes people who live in these areas but are Punjabi or Urdu-speaking with domiciles in the 11 districts of these three divisions. This may be one reason why we hear a united voice for new provinces.

The writer is a freelancer