Pakistan is once again debating a redrawing of its administrative map. Reports suggest proposals under informal discussion include bringing Karachi and Gwadar under federal control, splitting Punjab into multiple provinces, and dividing Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, all widely read as groundwork for a 28th Constitutional Amendment. The proposal has split Pakistan’s two apex lawyers’ bodies. The  Supreme Court Bar Association has endorsed the push, while the Pakistan Bar Council insists it must proceed strictly through the constitutional process and only after building national consensus. That divide frames the questions this article examines: what the Constitution actually requires to create a new province; what six decades of jurisprudence on amending power suggest about how such a change would fare; what Pakistan’s own administrative history says about redrawing internal boundaries; and whether the political arithmetic makes any of this achievable in the near term.

The Shape of the Proposal

No bill has been tabled in Parliament. Speaking to journalists in May 2026, Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar said he saw “no indications” of a 28th Amendment materializing imminently, while confirming that consultations with coalition partners were ongoing and that any eventual bill would proceed only once consensus was reached, explicitly invoking the Eighteenth Amendment’s cross-party consensus as the model to follow. Tellingly, Law Minister Tarar did confirm that two specific proposals were live within those consultations: the creation of a separate Hazara province and a separate Saraiki province, alongside measures on population control. He also noted that the Muttahida Qaumi Movement has for some time pressed for constitutional amendments to strengthen local government structures, a demand it has linked to threats of a “final decision” if unmet. This confirms that, whatever the fate of the wider province-restructuring package, the older, narrower Hazara and Saraiki movements discussed in Section IV below are the proposals furthest along in actual coalition-level discussion.

Beyond these two specific proposals, what circulates is a mix of ministerial statements and draft texts under wider discussion: Punjab divided into units such as North, Central and South Punjab, Pothohar and Bahawalpur; Sindh into Karachi, Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, Sukkur and Larkana; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa into Peshawar, Hazara, Malakand and Dera Ismail Khan; and Balochistan into Quetta, Makran, Zhob and Kalat, with Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jammu & Kashmir raised separately.  Some versions couple this with a redesigned federal executive: a directly elected President as head of government, an enlarged Federal Cabinet drawing on sitting Chief Ministers, abolition of the National Assembly, and a single-chamber Senate as the sole federal legislature. None of the executive-redesign elements are confirmed government policy; they should be read as a circulating proposal, not settled text, and treated with the caution that follows from that.

The idea of a 28th Amendment is, in any case, not entirely new: Adviser to the Prime Minister on Political Affairs Rana Sanaullah had already floated the possibility as early as November 2025, tying it to unspecified “public issues” and conditioning it, even then, on political consensus, suggesting the present debate is the continuation of an eight-month-old conversation rather than a sudden development.

The Constitutional Route: Article 1 and Article 239

Article 1 of the Constitution is declaratory; it names Pakistan’s provinces but supplies no freestanding mechanism for creating new ones. The operative clause is Article 239(4), which requires a two-thirds majority in the relevant provincial assembly before any bill altering a province’s limits can proceed through the ordinary two-thirds majorities in the National Assembly and Senate. No party today commands a two-thirds majority anywhere in this chain, and thus, any move to create new provinces would require broad political consensus. More fundamentally, Pakistan Bar Council lawyers argue that Article 239(4) was drafted for altering an existing province’s boundaries, not for creating a new one from scratch,  unlike India, where Articles 2 and 3 expressly empower Parliament to form new states by ordinary legislation after consulting the affected state legislature. On this reading, an express province-creation power would first need to be inserted into the Constitution,........

© Paradigm Shift