The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly will get 23 more seats if and when the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) are merged into the province.
This is what the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government proposed in the Constitution (30th Amendment) Bill, 2017 introduced in the National Assembly in May this year as one of the major steps planned with regard to the merger.
The merger makes complete political sense and is supported by the federal cabinet, the KP government and almost all the major parties. But the changes it will trigger in other houses are likely to disturb the electoral calculus of some political parties and that may well be one of the reasons behind the government decision to defer the passage of the bill despite the clear possibility of seeing it through parliament.
The KP Assembly currently has 124 seats (99 general, 22 women, 4 non-Muslim) and the Fata merger will bring in additional 23 (18 general, 4 women and 1 non-Muslim).
Fata, however, at present has 12 seats in the National Assembly which are double its share in the country’s population as enumerated in the sixth population census.
The tribal areas have always had this rather dubious distinction. They were awarded seven seats in the country’s first directly elected National Assembly (with the present four provinces then having a total of 131 seats). That was higher than Fata’s share in population.
But the share proportionate to population made little sense then as the elections in Fata were held under limited franchise that gave voting right only to a select few thousand maliks.