THE system is now under mounting pressure and has run into an entirely unnecessary impasse. The ‘system’ here consists of the unique configuration of power that emerged from the tainted elections of February 2024. In this configuration, everybody has been given just enough of a slice of power to obtain their buy-in, but not enough for any of them to become spoilers.

The PPP gets Sindh, Nawaz Sharif and family get Punjab, and the PTI gets KP, while Shehbaz Sharif sees his age-old wish to sit in the prime minister’s chair fulfilled. Balochistan remains an orphan in this configuration, like it has in most previous ones. It is the one province that needs an organic and rooted political process more than any other to arrest its spiral into insurgency.

Each party in this configuration brought its own limited agenda to the table. The PPP just wants to stay in power in Sindh. The Nawaz family wants to wean back the Punjab voter, which it lost to the PTI. It is not clear what exactly the PTI leadership in KP wants. They can’t seem to make up their minds whether they are part of the system of rule in the country, or an insurgent force out to topple it. And at the centre, the government of Shehbaz Sharif just wants to last its term by balancing the demands placed upon it by all its partners in the Assembly and its patrons in power.

Into this delicate configuration, where it is more or less each to their own, come two entirely unnecessary demands that have become lightning rods for discontentment. One is the canals project in Punjab, which has stirred the street in Sindh in a way not seen in decades. For almost a week now, the towns and cities of the province have been ablaze with protests, joined by civil society organisations including the big bar associations of Karachi.

The entire supply chain for industry is now disrupted as the protests are escalating.

The National Highway has been blocked in at least three places, halting the movement of cargo of raw materials to industry upcountry, finished goods for export orders from upcountry to the ports, oil movement, and all else besides. The Oil Companies Advisory Council has warned that 800 tankers are stranded between Sukkur and Larkana, and oil shortages could develop in Punjab and KP if the road is not opened up quickly.

The entire supply chain for industry is now disrupted as the protests have moved into their second week, and are escalating. Strikes have been announced by goods carriers, highways and key arteries have been blocked, and now there is talk of a province-wide general strike in the days ahead.

The PPP has found itself in the crossfire in all this. They gave a weak response to the initial announcement of the so-called Green Pakistan Initiative, which aims to build a series of canals in the Cholistan desert to irrigate arid land. Withdrawals of water from the Indus river system are a highly contentious issue in Sindh, which is the lower riparian and has already suffered heavily due to the drying up of water flows. It makes no sense to irrigate a desert with river water that is needed for agriculture downstream.

But in this configuration of power, where every member of the power system is in the game for their own interests, somehow it made sense to somebody in the so-called Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) to launch this project.

The minerals bill in the KP Assembly has turned into a similar lightning rod around which the discontents of this system — and they are legion — have been mobilised. The issue arose from the desire of the establishment to try and attract investment in the mining and minerals sector in Pakistan. In pursuit of this desire, bills were introduced in the provincial assemblies of Balochistan and KP. Both bills carry “the unmistakable imprint of the civil-military SIFC” according to an editorial in this paper, mainly because they allow for a door through which the federal government can encroach upon the mineral wealth of a territory, which is otherwise legally a provincial subject.

The Balochistan Assembly rubber-stamped the bill, but in KP it ran into stiff opposition. Initially, it was approved by the provincial cabinet, and the leadership of the PTI seemed to agree on ensuring its passage. But an uproar ensued when the provincial Speaker introduced it in the KP Assembly, with stiff opposition coming from the ANP and legislators from the merged districts. They were later joined by the JUI-F.

But here’s the rub. The combined voting power of all these parties is not enough to stop the passage of the bill should the Speaker put it up for a vote. With barely 20 members out of 146, they would be swept aside easily if the ruling party decides to see the bill through. But despite two attempts by the Speaker to hold meetings and hammer out a consensus, and despite high-level attempts by the PTI leadership of the province, the bill is still stalled mainly because the PTI leadership is unable to persuade its own members to vote in its favour. In the last attempt to forge a consensus, the Speaker said no further attempts to advance the bill could be made without the explicit authorisation of the party’s incarcerated chairman Imran Khan.

Neither controversy was necessary. The canals are a vanity project and not worth stirring up the whole system for. And investments in minerals can be arranged easily with a few tweaks to the existing legislation from 2017, with no need to bring in new legislation. What is at stake here is obviously a federal government that wants to lay claim to deeply held provincial prerogatives — mineral wealth and water allocations. And for this reason alone the entire configuration of power built after the elections of 2024 is now being tested.

The writer is a business and economy journalist.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2025