Politics of Identity and Naming of New Province: Saraikistan, Bahawalpur and South Punjab in Party Competition

Abstract

In this paper, the politics of naming on a long-existing demand of provincial reorganization in the southern part of Punjab, Pakistan has been analyzed. It maintains that competing denominations Saraikistan, Bahawalpur and South Punjab are not simply different names used to give the same territorial demand but differing political projects with history, identities, and electoral strategies. Saraikistan represents an ethnolinguistic identity that is based on Saraiki cultural, linguistic, and economic marginalization. Bahawalpur appeals to the revival of a historically recognizable political entity. South Punjab however, is an administrative and developmental term that is broader and help the mainstream political parties to organize a broader alliance without necessarily pledging to ethnic federalism. The study is a combination of both secondary and primary data as the methodological components include scholarly literature, political party manifestos, constitutional trends and political documents, and first-hand data were gathered with the use of semi-structured interviews involving the political parties’ leaders and the regional political actors. These interviews would be informative on the strategy of presenting the province issue by the elites within the party, bargaining regional sensibilities, and changing the choice of naming to suit electoral demands. As demonstrated in the paper, the political parties in Pakistan have moved across these identities based on the constitutional restrictions, regional interests and vote maximizations. It argues that calling “names” is itself a kind of political rivalry: parties do not just promise a new province, but they also strive to establish which language is legitimate in which such a province can be visualized, rationalized as well as institutionalized. With the unification of discourse, party strategy and interview-based evidence, the study is able to identify how the symbolic recognition, territorial memory, and electoral pragmatism intersect in the modern Pakistani federal politics.