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, cleared through every provincial assembly, before any actual province could be carved out under it. Complicating matters further, Article 239(5), inserted by the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, now bars courts from questioning any constitutional amendment “on any ground whatsoever”, a clause whose relevance becomes clearer once the doctrinal history behind it is traced.
A Legal Pattern Six Decades in the Making
The idea that Pakistan’s Constitution has features an amendment cannot lawfully reach did not begin with the 2015 judgment most commonly cited today. Its roots lie in Fazlul Quader Chowdhry v Muhammad Abdul Haque (PLD 1963 SC 486), an early case exploring the limits of delegated law-making power, later cited by India’s own Supreme Court in developing its basic structure doctrine. Later, in Mahmood Khan Achakzai v Federation of Pakistan (PLD 1997 SC 426), the Court went further and named three salient features: federalism, the parliamentary form of government, and Islamic provisions, while cautioning that a complete list could not be fixed with finality. Wukala Mahaz Barai Tahafuz Dastoor v Federation of Pakistan (PLD 1998 SC 1263) pressed the same argument in seeking to void an amendment outright, and Sindh High Court Bar Association v Federation of Pakistan (PLD 2009 SC 879) entrenched judicial independence and separation of powers as cardinal, non-negotiable features of the constitutional scheme. That fifty-year arc reached its clearest statement yet in District Bar Association, Rawalpindi v Federation of Pakistan (PLD 2015 SC 401), where thirteen of seventeen judges affirmed that courts may strike down a constitutional amendment that damages a salient feature, regardless of the majorities behind it, even as the bench split on how and when to exercise that power. It has since been described as the most significant assertion of substantive judicial review over the amending power in the country’s history.
What this lineage reveals is a pattern, not an isolated ruling: across six decades, whenever Parliament’s amending power has expanded, the judiciary has responded by carving out an ever more explicit doctrine of unamendable features, with federalism and judicial independence recurring in almost every iteration. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment’s Article 239(5) should be read against that pattern rather than in isolation. It follows a sequence of amendments: the Eighteenth Amendment’s judicial-appointments commission under Article 175A, the Twenty-First Amendment’s military courts (upheld, not struck down, in District Bar Association), and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment’s new Constitutional Bench, which have progressively narrowed the judiciary’s room to review executive and legislative action. Article 239(5) is the first of these, however, to attempt something categorically different: not narrowing review of a particular class of state action, but purporting to close off review of the amending power itself, the very power the District Bar Association bench had spent insisting was not absolute.
A Precedent Closer to Home: One Unit and the Politics of Redrawn Boundaries
Pakistan has, in fact, redrawn its provincial map once before, and that episode offers a cautionary pattern of its own. In 1955, under the Establishment of West Pakistan Act, the government merged Punjab, Sindh, the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan’s constituent states into a single administrative unit called West Pakistan. This ‘One Unit’ scheme was justified at the time as a route to administrative efficiency and parity with East Pakistan. It was imposed after provincial assemblies gave their consent under considerable political pressure, with several dissenting members being jailed or removed from office in the process. It generated fifteen years of sustained opposition in Sindh, the NWFP and Balochistan and is now widely regarded as a failed experiment that deepened rather than resolved Pakistan’s federal tensions. It was undone not through the ordinary constitutional amendment process but by martial-law fiat: General Yahya Khan’s Legal Framework Order of 1970 dissolved One Unit and restored the four provinces by executive proclamation.
The lesson is not that administrative restructuring is inherently illegitimate, but that Pakistan’s only precedent for large-scale redrawing of provincial boundaries was accomplished outside, not through, the ordinary constitutional process, first imposed and then reversed by decree. A 28th Amendment that genuinely ran the gauntlet of provincial-assembly and parliamentary supermajorities would, in that sense, be the first time Pakistan restructured its internal map by the constitutional method rather than around it.
Federal Restructuring Beyond Provincial Boundaries
Any package touching Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jammu & Kashmir carries a further complication: Article 1 does not list Gilgit-Baltistan among Pakistan’s territories, and the federal government has administered the region directly since the 1949 Karachi Agreement ceded it for that purpose. A seven-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Saqib Nisar ruled in January 2019 that the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction extends to Gilgit-Baltistan, that no part of the 1973 Constitution can be abolished or amended without proper legislation, and that the region’s constitutional status should instead be resolved through a referendum, directing that this process take place within fourteen days.
Separately, an August 2015 Gilgit-Baltistan Legislative Assembly resolution and a subsequent Nawaz Sharif-era reform committee recommended granting the region provisional provincial status, but explicitly conditioned that status on the plebiscite envisaged by UN Security Council Resolutions 91 (1951) and 122 (1957), precisely so as not to prejudice Pakistan’s position on the wider Kashmir dispute. Any 28th Amendment provision touching Gilgit-Baltistan would have to navigate that same constraint. Likewise, proposals to abolish the National Assembly or shift toward a presidential system would touch the ‘parliamentary form of government’ that the Achakzai and District Bar Association benches both named as a salient feature, while proposals for a constitutionally protected local government system sit comfortably within the devolution Article 140A already promises, and arguably extend it rather than reversing it.
Observations: What the Pattern Suggests
Three patterns emerge from this history that are easy to miss if the 28th Amendment is treated as a standalone proposal. First, doctrinally, Pakistan’s courts have never definitively closed the question of substantive limits on the amending power; each generation of judges has added to the list of salient features rather than settling it, and each generation of amendments since 2010 has tried to narrow judicial reach in response. The 27th Amendment’s ouster clause is the sharpest version of that legislative response yet, and it is reasonable to expect the doctrine to resurface in some form if a province-creation or recentralization amendment is ever actually challenged. Second, procedurally, every past attempt to redraw Pakistan’s internal boundaries at scale has bypassed rather than used the ordinary amendment machinery; One Unit was imposed and later dissolved by executive and martial-law order, not by two-thirds votes in provincial assemblies. A genuinely constitutional 28th Amendment would break that pattern, for better or worse. Third, politically, no reform of this scope has ever proceeded in Pakistan without a coalition partner capable of supplying the numbers, and today no single party, nor any plausible coalition currently in office, controls the two-thirds majorities Article 239(4) demands in Parliament, let alone in every affected provincial assembly simultaneously.
Conclusion
Four questions remain open, and each has a documented history behind it rather than a clean precedent: whether Article 239(4) can ground new-province creation at all, or whether a dedicated provision must first be inserted; whether a recentralising package can survive the salient-features test given the doctrine’s consistent recurrence since 1963; whether the Twenty-Seventh Amendment’s ouster clause can itself be reconciled with that doctrine; and whether a coalition without a two-thirds majority anywhere can secure the consensus the Bar Council and the PPP demand, or whether the Supreme Court Bar Association’s more permissive stance prevails. The Constitution does supply a route for creating new provinces — but that route runs through provincial assemblies and Parliament, not executive proclamation, and Pakistan has yet to test it. Whatever else the 28th Amendment eventually contains, that much is settled.
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Key Note: No official bill had been tabled in Parliament as of writing. Provisions attributed to the proposed 28th Amendment should be read as reported or circulated proposals, not confirmed legislative text.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Samea Bint Sahban is a third-year law student enrolled in the University of London’s external program, with a keen academic and practical interest in constitutional law, international human rights law, and the intersection of law and emerging technologies. Her work is particularly concerned with the relationship between law, rights, and evolving political and technological realities.
