Will the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) join the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or retain its present status? The federal cabinet is expected to give its decision on this crucial subject at its next meeting. The question was on its agenda at its last meeting, but was dropped at the eleventh hour. The pro-merger lobby slated the decision, insisting that the prime minister had come under pressure from the anti-merger allies. But at the next cabinet meeting the decision for or against merger is bound to come. Ground realities in Fata call for mainstreaming the tribal areas implementation any of the four options the reforms committee deliberated upon. The committee had failed to figure out what mainstreaming of Fata implied although it was one of the options before it. Somehow, the committee opted for a merger even when it was not on its agenda, inviting the charge that it was adopted as "it is administratively convenient to Islamabad." But as the supposed D-day for the government to decide the future of Fata draws near, the debate for and against merger is catching heat. The pro-merger forces are essentially concentrated in the Peshawar-Mardan area while the support in favour of mainstreaming the tribal areas stems from the southern areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Mehmud Khan Achakzai is against merger, saying that "since the Pashtuns live in areas from Durand Line to Mianwali, this 15,000 square-kilometer territory be declared Afghania province."

Since it is politics that precipitated this merger debate it is likely to lose much of its steam now - Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa says the military will support the government's efforts to "mainstream" the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The situation on the ground is that the tribal areas are even now being managed as hostile, no-go territory, as was the case in colonial days. But even then they have undergone tremendous socio-cultural and economic transformation. What stands in their way is not their wrongly blamed mindset, but the laws bequeathed by the British and preserved and practiced by the federal government. How come when the parliamentary committee headed by Senate chairman Raza Rabbani changed almost one-third of the Constitution it did not touch Article 247, and thus kept the tribesmen confined to the colonial darkness? And then who are these outsiders, in the opposition or part of the government, who are out to decide the future of Fata's inhabitants? Their fate has got to be decided by themselves, and for that there should be a referendum. What a joke that the Fata reforms committee did not recommend a referendum, fearing it could trigger similar demands for Hazara province and more provinces in Punjab and Sindh. That reflected a petty mindset. The bitter truth is that the committee headed by Sartaj Aziz saw the future of the tribal people through a bureaucratic prism and suggested an easy way out of it by proposing a merger of Fata with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. No doubt it has caused confusion, fuelled parochialism and divided the nation. Instead of taking a decision on merger the cabinet would be well advised to propose streamlining the tribal areas essentially by replacing the colonial era's legal system with what we have in Pakistan, give law-making powers to the elected Fata parliamentarians and then go for a referendum. This is indeed a huge challenge, but the issue is critical and requires no quick-fix solutions.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2017