The province that first said yes to Pakistan has, in every crisis since, chosen the federation. It has earned the right to insist that its own borders remain.
- Sindh has given Pakistan its foundation, its first capital, its constitution, its gas, its oil, its coal, its port revenues, its refuge and, above all, its restraint. It has asked, in return, only that its territorial integrity and its constitutional dignity be preserved — the smallest ask a founding federating unit can make.
Sindh will remain generous with Pakistan. But Sindh will not be divided.
Mohammad Ehsan Leghari
On the twenty‑first of February 2026, the Sindh Assembly did something it has now done in 2019, in 2024 and again this year: it rejected, with only token opposition, any proposal to divide the province or to detach Karachi from it. The resolution, moved by Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, held that Karachi is an inseparable part of Sindh, “yesterday, today, and forever.” Under Article 239 of the Constitution; which requires the assent of the concerned provincial assembly by a two‑thirds majority before any change to a provincial boundary can be enacted, that settled will is not decorative. It is dispositive.
Sindh’s relationship with the idea of Pakistan is not incidental. It is foundational. Long before the Lahore Resolution of March 1940 gave the Muslim League its national charter, the Sindh Provincial Muslim League — meeting in Karachi in October 1938 under G. M. Syed and Sir Haji Abdullah Haroon — had already passed a resolution urging political self‑government for Muslims and Hindus as separate national entities. Three years after Lahore, on 3 March 1943, G. M. Syed moved the Pakistan Resolution in the Sindh Legislative Assembly, and the House adopted it. Sindh became the first legislature in undivided British India to formally endorse the creation of Pakistan.
Consider the political map of that moment. Punjab was governed by the Unionist Party, a cross‑communal coalition actively hostile to partition. The Frontier had a Congress‑aligned ministry opposed to the Muslim League. Bengal was fractured. Sindh alone had a Muslim League government willing to translate the national demand into a binding legislative act. On 26 June 1947 the Sindh Assembly voted formally to join the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan — the first Muslim‑majority province to do so through a democratic legislative process. Sindh was not brought into Pakistan. Sindh brought Pakistan into being.
The generosity did not end there. At independence, Karachi; the province’s largest city and capital, its port, its cosmopolitan centre; was surrendered as the federal capital. Simultaneously, Sindh absorbed one of the largest demographic transfers in modern history. Migrants came from across northern India, a linguistic and cultural universe fundamentally different from the host society. Karachi’s population expanded; Urdu, previously virtually unknown as a mother tongue in the province, became the majority language of its own capital. Sindh made room; and remained politically committed to the state that had authored the transformation.
For seventy‑nine years Sindh has been the most consistently pro‑federation province of Pakistan — a pattern legible in every national crisis.
In 1971, when East Pakistan fell and the surviving federation was demoralized and fragmented, it was a leader from Sindh, Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who took charge of what remained. His Pakistan Peoples Party, drawing its deepest base from Sindh, gave the country its 1973 Constitution: a unanimous, consensus document that remains the only accepted framework of the federation. It was Sindh’s leadership that wrote Article 239 into those walls; precisely because Sindh, having lived through One Unit, knew what it meant when federating units could be redrawn by central fiat.
In 1983, when Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship was at its most entrenched, Sindh carried the physical weight of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy. Hundreds died across rural Sindh. The province paid, in blood, for the return of a democratic Pakistan; and did not turn its grief into secession.
On 27 December 2007, when Shaheed Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi and the country stood at the edge of disintegration, it was Asif Ali Zardari’s response — Pakistan Khappay, “Pakistan must live,” spoken in Sindhi in the hours after his wife’s murder — that pulled the province back from the brink. The 18th Amendment and the 7th National Finance Commission Award, which followed in 2010, were the delayed dividend of that restraint.
And in 2024–25, when the federal government proposed six new canals under the Green Pakistan Initiative; an existential threat to the Indus, the province erupted in sustained mass mobilization. The Sindh Assembly passed a formal resolution against the Cholistan Canal Project on 13 March 2025. On 24 April 2025 the Prime Minister’s Office backed down, stating that no new canals would be constructed without inter‑provincial consensus. Sindh had won; without threatening the federation, exactly as it had done in 1971, 1983 and 2007.
Consider now what Sindh contributes to the federation, and what it receives in return.
Sindh produces approximately 61–62 percent of Pakistan’s natural gas and roughly 40 percent of its crude oil — a share now at rough parity with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as new KP fields have come online. Its Thar coalfield holds vast measured reserves integrated into the national grid. The wellhead royalty paid to the producing province has been fixed at 12.5 percent — a formula so inadequate that the Sindh cabinet has now approved receiving royalty gas in kind rather than in cash. For decades, Sindh’s gas has heated Punjab’s kitchens, run its industry and powered its fertilizer plants. Sindh has only argued, in the constitutional space, for a fairer deal.
Karachi is widely estimated to generate between fifty and sixty percent of national revenue and houses the country’s two primary deep‑water ports, its central bank and its stock exchange. Yet the provincial government of Sindh does not control most of Karachi’s land. The six cantonments alone cover approximately 40 percent of the city; by area, the most valuable 40 percent, outside civilian jurisdiction. Credible independent land studies suggest the provincial government directly controls under one‑fifth of the urban footprint of its own capital.
On water, as the lower riparian, Sindh is hydro‑ecologically vulnerable to every upstream diversion. The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord allocated 48.76 million acre‑feet to Sindh and required a minimum 10 MAF downstream discharge below Kotri. Actual flows have dropped below 2 MAF in low‑flow years, and below 1 MAF in severe drought. The Arabian Sea has encroached miles inland across Thatta, Badin and Sujawal. Mangrove cover has collapsed, by various estimates, from roughly 345,000 hectares to between 160,000 and 205,000 today. Sindh has borne this.
The argument for division is that Karachi’s governance is dysfunctional; poor infrastructure, weak service delivery, inadequate municipal capacity. These are real problems, shared with most of Pakistan’s metropoles. They are not solved by creating a new province.
Karachi’s governance problems have three specific causes, and none requires redrawing provincial boundaries. First, on the question of local government, Sindh is not the delinquent province. It is the exemplary one. Sindh is the only province in Pakistan today with a functioning, elected local government system: Karachi elected its Mayor and Deputy Mayor through the Sindh Local Government framework in June 2023, and elected councils are in place across the province. In Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa local governments have been in prolonged limbo or expiry; Balochistan’s system has proved chronically fragile. On the single reform division advocates say Karachi most needs; elected, decentralized local governance, Sindh is the province that has done it. What the system needs is not dissolution but strengthening: greater fiscal autonomy for the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation and the town councils, protected revenue streams, and the transfer to elected mayors of powers currently retained by higher bureaucracies. Second, roughly 40 percent of the city is federally controlled cantonment land beyond civilian jurisdiction; the solution is to return federally held urban land to civilian municipal control, not to hand more territory to the federation. Third, Karachi’s revenue is siphoned upward, and would remain so in a separate Karachi province — an urban rump with no rural resource base and no ability to sustain itself outside the National Finance Commission framework it would have just weakened.
There is also a precedent that a serious federalist ought to weigh. If Sindh can be divided because a minority political party in one city demands it, no provincial boundary in Pakistan is stable — not in south Punjab, not in Hazara, not in southern Balochistan.
Sindh is not an administrative unit that British cartographers drew in the nineteenth century. It is one of the oldest continuously named regions in the world — the name predates the Vedas, the Indus civilization is its taproot, and Sindhi as a literary language has a thousand years of unbroken tradition. Its regional identity has survived every political convulsion of the last two millennia. To divide it, at this late date, to solve a municipal governance problem in one of its cities, is not a reform proposal. It is a category error.
The province that first raised its hand for Pakistan in March 1943, that gave the country its constitution in 1973 that stood for democracy in 1983, that said Pakistan Khappay in the darkness of December 2007, and that fought a canal war within the constitutional order in 2025, has not earned the right to be dismantled. It has earned the opposite right — to be trusted with its own borders.
Sindh has given Pakistan its foundation, its first capital, its constitution, its gas, its oil, its coal, its port revenues, its refuge and, above all, its restraint. It has asked, in return, only that its territorial integrity and its constitutional dignity be preserved — the smallest ask a founding federating unit can make.
Sindh will remain generous with Pakistan.
But Sindh will not be divided.
Read: The Whistle and the River
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The author is a water expert, former Sindh member of Indus River System Authority (IRSA), and a prolific writer
