The long argument for citizenship.
Years of jirgas, dialogue, and patient negotiation toward ending a colonial-era legal regime — and the work that begins after a constitutional victory, not before it.
Background
For most of Pakistan's history, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — Bajaur among them — were governed under a separate, colonial-era legal framework called the Frontier Crimes Regulations. Residents lived without the protections enjoyed by other Pakistanis: no access to the higher judiciary, collective punishment by statute, executive authority unchecked by ordinary law.
The merger of these districts into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018 was the formal end of that regime. It was not a gift from above. It was the result of decades of argument from below.
The youth movement
I helped organize and lead a youth movement that campaigned for the legal and constitutional integration of the former tribal areas into Pakistan's mainstream provincial structure. The work involved years of jirgas, dialogue, and patient negotiation with elders who had reasons to be sceptical of yet another reform promise, and with a state that had its own institutional inertia to overcome.
What changed
The constitutional gain is real. Residents of the merged districts now have, on paper, the same rights as any other citizen: access to the courts, the franchise in provincial elections, ordinary civil and criminal jurisdiction. The legal regime that defined their status as a separate, lesser tier of citizen is gone.
What hasn't
The on-the-ground delivery is another story. Schools, hospitals, courts, and the basic apparatus of provincial administration have arrived unevenly, slowly, and sometimes not at all. The constituency that fought hardest for inclusion now faces the harder task of holding the state to the promise that inclusion implied.
That is the work that comes after the headline. It is less photogenic, less mobilising, and far more important.
A constitutional victory is not the end of the argument. It is the beginning of a longer one.
- Holding the post-merger state to its delivery commitments — schools, courts, basic services.
- Documenting and contesting the slow erosion of post-2018 gains in moments of security retrenchment.
- Civic literacy work with young people in the merged districts, so the next generation can argue for themselves.
- Bridging customary institutions — jirga, hujra — with formal provincial law, rather than treating them as rivals.