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Sindh does not need an introduction. It carries one of the world’s oldest urban civilisations, a Sufi tradition that shaped the region’s social fabric long before any modern state existed. Any conversation about Pakistan’s federation has to begin here, because Sindh was not a reluctant partner in this country’s creation. It was the first.
Few regions on earth have absorbed as many conquests and kept their own character intact. Mohenjo Daro and the wider Indus Valley Civilisation flourished here more than four thousand years ago. Even after that urban order faded, the land kept drawing empires towards it rather than fading into obscurity.
Darius of Persia made Sindh a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire around 500 BCE. Alexander marched through it in 325 BCE and his successors left behind Greek administrative traces that Sindh eventually absorbed and outlasted. The Mauryans held it and the Rai dynasty ruled it as an independent Hindu kingdom. Then, in 712 CE, Muhammad bin Qasim’s conquest brought Islam into the Subcontinent for the first time through Sindh, centuries before it reached Delhi or Punjab in any organised political form.
None of these transitions erased what came before. Buddhist stupas, Hindu temples and early mosques coexisted in the same towns for generations and Sindh’s population absorbed each new ruling order without losing its own Sindhi language and identity underneath it.
The centuries that followed brought the Soomra and Samma dynasties, local Sindhi rule that pushed back against outside control and gave the province some of its longest stretches of self-government. Then came the Arghuns and Tarkhans, Mughal annexation under Akbar in 1591, the Kalhora dynasty’s revival of local rule in the 18th century and finally the Talpur Mirs, who governed Sindh right up until Charles Napier’s conquest in 1843, which folded it into British India.
Through every one of these transitions, Sindh’s Sufi shrines, Shah Abdul Latif Bhattai in Bhit Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan, kept functioning as spaces where sectarian and even religious lines blurred and where Hindu and Muslim Sindhis prayed at the same thresholds well into the 20th century.
That is not incidental colour. It is why Sindh has never fit neatly into anyone else’s script, whether that script was written in Delhi, Bombay or, later, Islamabad. A land that survived Achaemenids, Greeks, Arabs, Mughals and the British without losing its own tongue is not a place that easily accepts being told how to run itself.
That resilience shaped Sindh’s approach to Pakistan itself. Four years before independence, in March 1943, the Sindh Assembly became the first legislative body in British India to pass a resolution formally demanding Pakistan. At the time, the idea was still contested even within Muslim political circles in Punjab and the United Provinces. Sindh’s leadership, cutting across factions, staked its future on the idea early and unambiguously. Sindh’s claim on Pakistan is not sentimental. It is documented and it came first.
An administrative thread runs through this too, one that predates Pakistan. After the 1843 annexation, Sindh was folded into the Bombay Presidency and run as an appendage of a province it shared little with geographically or culturally. It took nearly a century of political effort before Sindh was separated from Bombay in 1936 and given its own provincial status. Sindh’s demand for recognition on its own terms is older than the country itself and it explains why questions of autonomy carry particular weight here.
That memory was tested again after independence. The One Unit scheme of 1955 dissolved Sindh’s provincial identity altogether, merging it into West Pakistan alongside Punjab, Balochistan and the then-North Western Frontier Province (NWFP). For 15 years, Sindh had no separate assembly and no formal say over its own resources. When One Unit was dismantled in 1970, Sindh’s restoration as a province was treated locally not as a bureaucratic correction but as the reversal of a genuine grievance and another chapter in a very long pattern of the province defending its own standing.
For most of the last two decades, the PPP has governed Sindh continuously. This is where the current devolution debate gets complicated. At the federal level, the PPP has been the most consistent political voice for provincial autonomy. The PPP-led coalition pushed through the 18th Amendment in 2010, dissolving the Concurrent List, shifting subjects, and moving a larger share of the divisible pool under the NFC Award from the centre to the provinces. On paper, no party has done more to decentralise power in Pakistan.
The trouble is what happened once that power reached Karachi. Instead of continuing devolution downward to districts and city governments, Sindh’s provincial government has spent much of the last decade doing the opposite. Local bodies elections were delayed repeatedly and, when finally held, elected mayors and district councils were left with thin powers. Karachi, which generates a disproportionate share of the country’s tax revenue and remains Pakistan’s only real financial and industrial capital, has a local government system that cannot independently manage its own solid waste, water supply or municipal planning without provincial sign-off.
The same logic Sindh’s leadership used against the federal government for decades has not been extended to the province’s own cities and districts. The real devolution conversation now is not between Islamabad and Karachi. It is between Karachi and the Sindh Secretariat.
This brings up the harder question that surfaces every few years: should Sindh be broken into smaller provinces. The demand is not new. Sections of the MQM and some smaller urban Sindh political groups have periodically floated a separate Karachi or urban Sindh province, arguing the rural-urban divide within Sindh is now wide enough to justify separate administrative status and pointing to the South Punjab movement as precedent.
I do not think that argument holds up against the actual problem. Punjab is larger than Sindh in population and has not needed a split to deliver functioning local governance in most of its districts. Sindh’s governance deficit is not a size problem. It is an accountability problem. Redrawing a map does not fix that. A new province also means new secretariats and new patronage networks layered on top of the ones already entrenched in Karachi and Hyderabad, multiplying administrative overhead without multiplying competence.
What actually starves Karachi and rural Sindh alike is the absence of real fiscal transfer and decision-making authority at the local level, not the absence of a provincial boundary.
The harder, more honest path is finishing the devolution Sindh itself demanded, all the way down to the union council and district level. There should be real budgets, real staff and real accountability to voters rather than to a provincial cabinet. That is a difficult sell politically, since it requires an incumbent government to give up power rather than simply demand it from above. But it is the only version of devolution that reaches the people it claims to serve and it is consistent with a province that has never accepted being governed from a distance, by anyone, for very long.
Sindh earned its place in this federation and its right to self-rule long before that, through survival and struggle rather than concession. What it deserves now is not a smaller map but a government, at every tier, that treats devolution as something owed downward as consistently as it was once demanded upward.
The writer tweets/posts @FarrukhJAbbasi
