Geography or ethnicity

THIS piece proceeds from a simple fact: all available data, such as the multidimensional poverty index (MPI), tells us that social inequality and economic marginalisation in Pakistan are correlated with geography. Looking at MPI or human development index maps shows us this fact clearly. There are clusters of low-poverty, moderately developed districts around GT Road (north and central Punjab); a few districts do better than their respective provincial average in KP (Hazara and the Peshawar valley); and Karachi presents itself as an outlier in Sindh. Balochistan is largely a high poverty and underdevelopment zone.

Now comes the difficult part: this fact requires interpretation and analysis. Interpretations carry policy-related consequences: what is to be done. But they also carry political consequences: who is responsible, who can fix this problem, how can it be fixed.

Because underdevelopment maps onto provincial differences and because provincial boundaries broadly (though not fully) correspond to ethnolinguistic divides, it is plausible to make a case for inequality and underdevelopment being a product of ethnic discrimination. What this means is that prejudiced and discriminatory attitudes produced patterns of development spending and economic growth that allowed for some areas to prosper considerably more than others.

This is one standard interpretation made by parties, activists and intellectuals from underdeveloped parts of the country. The relative prosperity of some areas then becomes a function of ethnic majoritarianism and ethnic power associated with Punjab.

If ethnic identities were perennial status groups, such assimilation would be considerably harder.

Politics is not meant to represent clean, causal inference. It is necessarily messy, emotional and subjective. Prejudice and discrimination are felt by many across the country, which is why ethnonationalist politics that mobilises against majority prejudice and discrimination repeatedly finds its takers. To paraphrase Stuart Hall, ethnicity is the language through which class (and inequality) is articulated in Pakistan.

But that does not foreclose the possibility of different interpretations and analyses, with the same intention of addressing inequality and underdevelopment. Here I think other frameworks, such as the notion of ‘combined and uneven development’ from the materialist tradition, may be more useful.

Put simply, the variation in development that we see is because of long-standing legacies of how states and markets evolved in different parts of northwest India. In central Punjab, and along the GT Road all the way to the Peshawar valley, development was closely tied to colonial interventions in irrigation-based agriculture and grain market formation, and post-colonial continuities in state employment, military recruitment and gulf migration. In Karachi, market formation was tied to migrant capital and the emergence of a private sector that absorbed labour and created an expanded middle class.

In other parts of the country, however, continuities from the colonial era meant that extraction of natural resources — water and carbon — formed the basis of their integration into the national economy after independence.

A story of underdevelopment that ignores these patterns and relies only on the premise of ethnic discrimination makes a couple of mistakes. The first is that if prejudice, or status discrimination, is the determining variable, we would not see variation in development outcomes/indicators across ethnic groups depending on their geographic location. Which is to say that Pakhtun populations settled in Rawalpindi and Karachi have different trajectories, of both economic outcomes but also social integration, compared to Pakhtuns in the so-called western peripheries.

Pakhtuns in the Peshawar valley have development indicators similar to Punjabi speakers in neighbouring districts to their east, but markedly different indicators compared to their co-ethnics immediately in the west (in the newly merged districts). Similarly, Baloch assimilation has taken place in many districts of Punjab over the last several centuries, especially in the south and the west, with considerable representation in land ownership, military service and even electoral politics. If ethnic identities were perennial status groups, such assimilation would be considerably harder.

The second mistake is that there is a frequent conflation of the demographic majority of Punjab province with an ethnic majoritarianism of Punjabis. The latter is harder to establish because Punjabiat, as a politicised status identity, does not exist as an explicit force imposed on national politics. In fact, an emergent Punjabi nationalist movement seeks precisely to recover language and cultural heritage in service of its own ethnic politics (which may pose a more dangerous problem in the future). What does exist in the present, though, is the privileged position of Punjab as a geographic region.

It is useful to make this distinction precisely because Pakistan’s combined and uneven development does not lend itself easily to comparisons with other, categorical forms of ethnic or racial discrimination, such as that of black people in the US or Muslims and scheduled caste citizens in India. All of these groups face discrimination because of who they are and what identity they are ascribed with, regardless of their geographic location within the same polity.

None of this is to deny the existence of prejudice that exists between privileged and underprivileged communities across Pakistan and its real impact on politics. Prejudice today likely serves as an important factor in sustaining some discriminatory policies of the state, via racialised depictions of certain groups as ‘security threats’ or ‘traitors’.

However, within the narrower concern of inequality and underdevelopment, a different lens may be more productive. The framers of the 1973 Constitution were certainly on to something when they introduced geographic quotas, instead of linguistic ones, not just because the former is easier to administer but also because it runs closer to the real causes of inequality.

A solution based on this interpretation is also put forward by Rafiullah Kakar, who argues that fixing Pakistan’s federal structure by empowering the Senate is essential. This will help equalise political strength across provinces and rectify the existing skew produced by the intersection of uneven development and geography.

Secondly, given how there is such large inter-district variation, even within the same province, empowered and well-resourced local governments would also likely go a long way in addressing developmental gaps.

The writer teaches politics and sociology at Lums.

X: @umairjav

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2026