TO deny a people their fundamental rights is to unduly test their patience, even their loyalty to the nation. One need look no further than our own history as testament to that. Yet we have allowed Gilgit-Baltistan to exist in constitutional limbo since Independence, wilfully blind to the mounting evidence of growing anger and a sense of alienation among its people. A seven-judge Supreme Court bench has taken up a number of petitions challenging the GB Order 2018 and the GB Empowerment and Self-Governance Order of 2009, and demanding the right of the people of GB to be governed through their chosen representatives. On Thursday, the apex court was informed that the government had formed a high-level committee to consider constitutional, legislative and administrative reforms for GB. Chief Justice Saqib Nisar has put the government on notice that should it fail to follow through on its stated intention, the court would adjudicate on the matter.

The people of GB could scarcely have imagined that more than seven decades after their voluntary accession to the newly formed Pakistan, they would remain subjected to a quasi-colonial form of governance. Indeed, in many ways, the situation has actually regressed. Not only has their long-standing demand — that GB be given the status of the country’s fifth province, if provisionally — fallen on deaf ears, they have found their hard-fought limited political empowerment severely curtailed. The controversial GB Order 2018 gave sweeping powers to the prime minister by reducing the status of the GB Council, from being a legal mechanism through which the federation exercised its authority over certain subjects pertinent to the region, to a mere advisory body. That deprived about 2m Pakistani citizens of even a semblance, however flawed, of representative governance. These one-step-forward-two-steps-back shenanigans have played havoc with the rights of the people. The simmering discontent exploded into public view recently after the government attempted to impose federal taxes on the area, an area whose undetermined federal status is the very crux of local grievances. It was another reminder that the stability of the region is vital to the viability of CPEC, and it cannot be secured if the state persists in treating GB like a vassal state. The PTI government should do right by a people who have waited far too long for the constitutional rights promised to them.

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2018